There are few activities in life that provoke more profound existential crises than working on the obits desk of a suburban local newspaper. This week has, unfortunately, been a busy week for tributes to our great and good - Anthony Minghella and Arthur C. Clarke among them - but the point of my long, hot summer writing about the deaths of ordinary people was the sheer ordinariness of it. I missed the point.

At that paper, unlike at The Times, there was no high bar of eminence to getting an obituary. Families of the deceased would simply place a call, and it would then be passed on to me. There is, I believe, something of interest in every life - but you may have to be a great investigative reporter to find it. I was not, and this led to difficulties in me filling 400 words on the latest grandma to sigh her last. They had humdrum jobs and predictable progeny. The men maybe did something in the Rotary, the women raised children. “Did she have any hobbies?” I asked one son, in desperation. “No, but, oh, wait a minute,” - my pen hovered - “she watched a lot of TV.”

Months of this left me fretful and morose. “What would you like written in your obituary?” is a question often used by dubious self-help gurus to motivate people to change their life. I was sure that I did not want a list of my favourite shows. Now I can see that I was young, foolish and wrong.

A few days ago I met a man who had written a lot of obituaries for The Times, and we exchanged notes. Unlike me, his sample of deceased were preselected stars of their field, and unlike me, he noticed a theme in most of their life stories - suffering. So often, he said, had a luminary faced the kind of catastrophe that most of us dread. A case in point, Arthur C. Clarke had a bad bout of polio as a child that left him permanently debilitated.

This effect is most thoroughly investigated in a book called The Price of Greatness, by Arnold Ludwig, an American professor of psychiatry. He selected 1,000 of the most prominent people of the 20th century, roughly based on the number of lines accorded to them in the Encyclopedia Britannica. By comparing a close analysis of their lives with the national average, he could build an eight-point “template for greatness”.

It does not make for an appealing personal ad. Of course, talent is one element, but so is physical suffering - more than a quarter of his group were very sickly children. They were also likely to be loners, contrary, dominating and psychologically tortured. “Extraordinary achievements don't arise from emotional contentment,” the professor concluded.

The real reason why I had become embittered writing about the lives of ordinary people? Because they had achieved something: contentment, boring as it is to others. Whereas for my Times colleague, writing about the lives of the famous was profoundly consoling. The great are to be admired, but not envied. Do you want to be honoured, or happy?

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