I captured this fellow in Aix-en-Provence last week. I occasionally notice men like him, roughly my age, behind counters, pushing carts, stacking shelves, mopping floors that don’t really need it.

There’s a stillness about these men. Not defeat, exactly, but something adjacent. A kind of withdrawal. And I find myself wondering – not out of pity, but curiosity – what roads led there. Which turns mattered. Which opportunities never came, or came disguised and passed unnoticed. Or perhaps they were never part of the equation to begin with.

I don’t pity them. If anything, I recognize something familiar. As men, we don’t have the built-in structure that something like motherhood can provide. Much of our sense of meaning has to be constructed. It becomes about direction, about proving something – to ourselves, to those around us, to society at large. And when that framework isn’t clear, or never quite takes hold, a certain stillness can settle in.

If anything, I’ve come to understand that life is rarely a straight line. It’s not governed by effort alone. Lives bend under pressure, drift with circumstance, stall under weight that isn’t visible from the outside.

Reaching anything resembling an ambition requires more than will. It takes timing, conditions, and a certain level of self-trust – the belief that something beyond survival is even available, attainable, achievable.

My own trajectory didn’t start with direction. The first fifteen years were uneven, at times fractured. Then something shifted. A loss that opened a door. A move. A reset. From there, a different path began.

Luck is often dismissed, as if acknowledging it diminishes what follows. It doesn’t. It explains it. Opportunity means little if it isn’t recognized. Recognition means nothing without action. But without that initial opening, there is nothing to act on – unless you manage to force one into existence, which I’ve done repeatedly in my role as a freelancer.

So when I see men like the guy above, I don’t see failure. I see variation. Parallel lives shaped by different sequences. And the distance between those outcomes is smaller than it appears.