The Worker's Pointless Problem

Once upon a time there was a lowly peasant, a worker who worked twelve hours a day beneath the baking sun on the king's various extravagant building projects. He, like nearly every other worker, hated the king and his selfish, pointless buildings, bridges, boats, and other things, for the king already had plenty of them, and the villagers weren't even allowed to glance at such architecture by law, or they would be beheaded and fed to pigs. This worker, however, realized that if every worker were to stop working on such architecture, the king would not be able to punish them all without loosing the ability to build more of his selfish buildings. He tried to tell his buddies that this was the case, but they all ignored him. Eventually, he died an old worker, and nothing in the kingdom changed.

This is a perfect example of a boring, pointless story, for nothing great or necessarily bad happens in it. The main character does have a problem, but he doesn't try hard enough to solve it, so he ends up giving up on it. Do the main characters of a good story give up? Sometimes they do. I'm sure at least one greek tragedy tells the tale of a main character who gives up and dies, for people like to listen to those kind of stories at certain points in their life.

By the way, I've got to get back to work, for I am stalling by writing this nonsensical piece of grammatically correct gibberish. Goodbye.