Trying not to collapse

[excerpt from an e-mail by friend of mine, after a boring evening with his oldest friends]

Work is changing me, outside work all I can do is resting. Terrible! It's sounds like the story of the leprous prince, who prays so hard in order to recover and return to his palace that at the end he achives his goal (the only one in all the leprosarium); but when he finally goes back to the world all is mud and meaningless to him. Prayer has changed him, now he can only stay in the leprosarium with his new mates: the leprouses. Orror!
Anyway, things have to go this way, or you feel awful at work, because you can't enter the mechanism.

Oliver