A better question would be, "Why woulda man who has lost everything that he cares about continue to care about work?
As Nick Danger noted in his posts to this threads, a guy may still show up to work, but do a slipshod job, and certainly fail to invest his heart and soul in the endeavor...for, microcosmically or macrocosmically, why should he care about the future of anything when his only real connection to the future (his children) have been taken from him?
A husband whose wife dies is about ten times more likely to commit suicide than a wife whose husband dies.
Unemployed men commit suicide at twice the rate of employed men. Among women, there is no difference in the rate of suicide based on whether or not the woman is employed.
In the middle of the Great Depression, men were 650 percent more likely to commit suicide than women.
The suicide rate of adolescent boys has recently increased three times as quickly as the girls.
Just twenty years ago, young men (between 25 and 34) committed suicide at only twice the rate of young women; today, it is four times the rate. (Men's rate increased 26 percent;women's rate decreased 33 percent.)
In the 1980s, more men in the military committed suicide than were killed in Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama combined. And for each suicide, there were an estimated eight attempts.
When the farming crisis led to foreclosers and bankruptcies in the upper midwestern states in the early 1980s, the suicide rate among male farmers tripled.
What happens to men who lose their connection with the futre? I think the answer is obvious!