> at least he did something. That's living.
Yeah, true. But...let's be honest, the thing he did was very destructive, dumb, and doomed to failure; he didn't get the outcome he wanted going in, he's not happy with the outcome he ended up with, and he's not articulated any lessons he learned from it.
There's a lot of things he could have done. He could have changed careers, gone back to university, backpacked across Europe, sold his house, put everything he owned in storage, and then circled the globe hopping from port to port on tramp freighters. Instead he cached out a chunk of his pension, sold his house, spent all the equity, borrowed money from friends, and basically spent every penny he and his wife had on pretending to be running a restaurant.
Commiting suicide is "doing something", so I guess by your definition that's living? That doesn't seem very useful of a definition. Meanwhile, I have a rewarding job I deeply enjoy, I spend time with friends and family, I have hobbies, I learn new things. Am I not "living"?
> Put his shoes on and just listen and learn from the experience.
That would be easier to do if he'd learned from it first. I think the point of making mistakes and "living life" is learning from those mistakes, and becoming a better person. What do I learn from reading about someone's fatalistic retelling of something he tacitly admits he knew was dumb? "Don't sell your house to invest in a project with no real upside and an overwhelmingly likely chance of 100% losses"? "Don't spend money you need to feed your kids on a vanity project which you've sabotaged for your own convenience?"