How is cheating on one's spouse similar to career dissatisfaction? While either affliction may have a number of causes, there is often a single phenomenon underlying both. It's the principle that explains, for many people, the problems of love and meaning.
We may love our husband or wife and still feel some inexplicable (-seeming) discontent. The men will look at every attractive woman who walks by, hoping their wives won't notice and think ill of them. One could say they are innocent because they don't mean to be this way: It is an urge the denial of which would feel like lifelong incarceration, like soul death. Similarly, we may be proud of our work – lawyer, architect, salesman, whatever – while feeling "this is not me. This feels like an act, a giving-up, a missing of something that is the real me."
Love is a feeling and meaning in life is a feeling. But our feelings are rooted in our childhood, where the chemistry of starved needs may infect them in their root structure. If early on we are starved of nutrients, we will grow up compromised: Our brain, our vitality will never be what they should have been. It is no different to be raised with conditional love or no love. We will always be needing something. We will always lack those chemicals of mother-love, unconditional love. And we will not know who we are, what our "meaning" is, because pain has blocked our natural self from participating in the world.
It's simple. We have been stunted in our formation. We remain the "inner child." The fact that this is unpleasant and "deterministic" doesn't make it less true. So much of psychology and psychotherapy is based on the wish (or delusion) that our mind, the master, floats free, above our history. It is the immovable mover and the god of ourselves. This is the magical thinking of the child within us.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.