In the end you will die. Religion can possibly offer you something for after death (depending on if you choose the correct one - this is an argument I am intentionally avoiding even though I have opinions). Very few people have a career in religion and thus for most your career will have nothing to say.

Genetically if you don't have kids you are a dead end. You career will have some bearing on the life you give you kids (if you have any, I'm not trying to say you should!) but otherwise I believe it should stay out of your kids life.

Similar to the above, most people live with a married spouse (common law marriage: a legal marriage is not required for this discussion, though it may or may not matter for other purposes). While many people do meet their spouse through their career this is not required and the career itself has nothing to say about it. (historically kings and queens did marry for career reasons)

Note that both kids and a spouse implies you shouldn't allow your career to take up too much time even though many will try to.

Many people have hobbies. Even if you love the things you do at work, odds are your mind cannot handle doing it once you are done with work: your career cannot tell you anything about them. There are many people who pick a career because the things like love cannot support the life they otherwise want to live: their career can't tell them about the destination because it is purely something they do to get there.

All of this is to say that even if your career would offer you help on the destination, you should ignore it.

Its more complicated. Even somebody who is a dead end- can feed back into a extended clan-family and thus enrich the survival of related traits.

And when you contribute to a societey that overproduces resources, thrives scientifically and does not carry a load of parasites, then your career actions may push the cohort fitness.

This of course implies that the offspring of dedicated focus personal has desert flower traits- meaning every offspring will be dumb as a rock, and pro at procreation. Meaning clever people will have "Hippie" pregnant machine offspring and the "spiritual" birth-machines will have hyper-analytical "dead-enders". None of them happy with the state of the world.

Life as they say- finds a way- to make you despair with the result of the affair.

This is a great observation about “what matters”, though I imagine it falls on mostly deaf ears here at HN where many of us make success in our careers the destination.