Kierkegaard found an application for the three-em dash here: “I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away ⸻ yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ⸻ and wanted to shoot myself.”
I sympathize with this. I wonder if the author might find it helpful to reimagine the thinking they do as coming up with good questions, rather than good answers. I was inspired to try to do so myself after reading this essay: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-019-1902-1
"[I]f a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be credited with posing the question. This is because the framing of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often rests on an illogical leap into the unknown."
If you've ever taken a depression screener at a wellness visit, that's a consequence of this work. This paper describes how unreliable psychiatric diagnosis used to be. There were standards, but they ultimately came down to physician judgment. This created demand for more objective standards, which resulted in the "checklist" approach that we have now.
I shared this with my partner who works in palliative care. He said that it’s rare to hear people expressing deathbed regrets like this. What he hears more of is people saying that their illness is God’s punishment for a behavior pretty universally accepted as bad, especially when there’s substance abuse involved.