I also feel i do not get out of life what i put into it.
When i'm up this can be particularly painful because i'm putting out such a huge amount of effort and lavishing love on people... and not getting much back. That's why i crash.
I get intensely frustrated and decide since i can't wring the pleasure out of life that my heroic efforts deserve, the only thing i can do is decrease my efforts to try and balance out the equation more fairly. Then i just crash and am bitter and frustrated and get depressed and have such little energy my activities-of-daily living are overwhelming. I get long periods of feeling up and feeling down, like several months at least, as long as 16 months for depression.
I just don't get the usual amount of pleasure from life. When i was a teen i had a best friend who was brimming over with good health and very active and energetic and was always organizing and playing games of baseball and bowling and i would just look at her vacantly because i didn't enjoy either thing and i couldn't understand how she could get pleasure from such activities. When i'm up, sure i'll play and even enjoy myself. But when i'm down i'll just watch from the sidelines and eat potato chips. I'm down more than i'm up, so this is mostly my life experience.
I've also found that with exercise. I've tried it for relieving my depression but all that happens is i squander my puny amount of energy on it and i start to look like a derelict and my home becomes a health hazard because i have no energy for the activities-of-daily-living like showering, dishes, garbage, cleaning, etc. I've exercised for as long as six weeks without improvement. Clearly it's more important that i attend to my activities-of-daily-living as best i can than to walk on a treadmill. It's really an "either / or" choice for me.
My ex-husband was healthy and he just consistently put out the same decent amount of energy everyday and rarely got tired. He tolerated our long full-time work hours and daily commute fine and was active outside work. He was delighted to stay up til 2:00am every Saturday night at a dance club he loved and just cruised thru life with an even temper and a song in his heart. He rarely complained and toxic people were just like water on his back.
I found the long hours of full-time work and commuting punishing and intolerable and convalesced in my hours outside of work and was desperate for every second of sleep i could get and was tormented by his insistence on staying up at the dance club til 2:00am every Saturday. I'm uber-sensitive to toxic people and suffer a lot from their poisonous energy. Under stress i complain at length.
So that's two healthy people i've know well whose experience of life baffled me. I'm very envious of them, that they could go bowling or play with a radio controlled car and feel re-energized the next day and put in 17 active hours and sleep seven and get up and do it all again, day after day.
It must be nice to be healthy.