What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.
I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.