As a pseudo-endings trope, this page has spoilers. Consider this your only warning.
So What Do We Do Now? in Literature.
- The Afterward is entirely about the aftermath of a heroic quest. The thief is having trouble finding jobs now that her face is well known, the apprentice knight still needs to pay her debts, the main hero is learning how to be queen, and another knight is adjusting to early retirement due to disability. All of them miss the camaraderie and excitement of the quest, and are finding ways to fill the holes in their life.
- The soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front worry about this, because being so young, they have left no roots behind in the world to return to. Lucky for most them, this problem is solved when they die.
- Jo Walton's novel Among Others is all about what happens after the great battle is won and the surviving heroine is left to pick up the pieces of her life. The bookworm protagonist refers several times to Tolkien's coverage of this subject at the very end of The Lord of the Rings.
- Animorphs: After three years of keeping heavy secrets from everyone they know, having to contemplate the possibility of failing to save their loved ones, in some cases actually causing the death of those loved ones, and killing countless enemies (and enjoying it sometimes), the surviving Animorphs come out of the war struggling to find an identity that doesn't revolve around being a child soldier. Jake falls into a deep depression over his role in Rachel and Tom's deaths, and Tobias abandons humanity entirely to live as a hawk.
- Artemis Fowl, being an Insufferable Genius greedy teenager with high tech fairy friends, understandably feels this way whenever he has to deal with everyday life.Artemis: I went from saving the world to geometry in a week. I'm bored, Holly.
- At the end of the Warhammer Fantasy Blackhearts novels, the titular Boxed Crook unit has been cured of the remote-triggered poison that acted as an Explosive Leash to ensure their loyalty to Count Mannfred and allowed to go free. The day after they party to celebrate their newfound freedom, the survivors get together to ask what they are going to do next. And it turns out that for many of them, You Can't Go Home Again, either because it was ruined, or because they never had anything of value to go back to in the first place, and most of them have no prospects as civilians because fighting is all they know. Some of them even consider going back to Count Mannfred and asking him for a job.
- In the novel series The Demon Princes by Jack Vance, after killing the last of the titular "Princes" (the five most evil men in the Universe who destroyed the protagonist's homeworld), the hero is asked this question and can only answer "I don't know ... I have been deserted by my enemies.... The affair is over. I am done."
- Vance's Dying Earth short story "Guyal of Sfere" ends with the main characters asking "What shall we do..." after having defeated a major demon and acquiring a vast treasure of forgotten knowledge.
- Captain Vimes from the City Watch novels in the Discworld series nearly falls into this in Men at Arms, since he's rather reluctant to retire to the life of a nobleman. Luckily the newly appointed Captain Carrot convinces the Patrician to expand the watch and appoint Vimes as its Commander... albeit with the condition of accepting a knighthood.
- The original ending to Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card had Bean ask an exhausted Ender, "What will we do, now the war's over, Ender?" and Ender's only reply was that he needed to sleep. (This was followed by a scene between two bit-parters emphasizing just how difficult it would be for the Child Soldiers to adapt to normal life).
- Epilogue
starts with the heroes being dropped back on Earth, after having spent years saving the fantasy world of Cyraveil. They're back in their teenage bodies, at the exact moment they left, and their lives await. Some of them can handle the sudden lack of drama and magic and intrigue, while others really can't. Ultimately, even the one who could have happily settled back into normal life has to return to Cyraveil with the others, because the spell to do it requires exactly the right number of participants, and staying on Earth had become untenable for several of them. - Last line of Alan Dean Foster's Flinx Transcendent, the last book of the Humanx Commonwealth series — Flinx: "I'm bored."
- In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Only In Death, Rawne, who has long hated Gaunt, finds himself feel lost and bewildered, believing Gaunt to be dead. When he learns Gaunt is alive, he gets Sand In My Eyes.
- See Robert Heinlein's Glory Road. The main character gets out of 'Nam, kills a dragon, saves twenty universes, marries the empress, and is honored as a hero about 3/4 of the way through the book. He then has to figure out something else to do. By the last page he is back to being an adventurer.
- In a cameo appearance in another, less...tightly written...novel he is back to adventuring with the empress again, for an unspecified time. Probably she is on holiday.
- In the last chapter of Pamela Dean's The Hidden Land, Laurie actually says "What do we do now?" She and Ted have just returned from the Hidden Land, which they had imagined and played about for years as the Secret Country. Although readers are aware there's a third book, the bitter loss is described in painful detail. They even lampshade the "we learned something" business.It seemed that even imagination was no friend to them now. They could stumble from day to day, thinking they saw summons after summons back to the Hidden Land. But they had lost the Secret Country.
- The Hunger Games: After the first games are over.Peeta: What do we do now?
Katniss: We try to forget.
Peeta: I don't want to forget. - Keith Laumer's "In The Queue" raises that question. The Queue is generations long, and even after you get to the front, you may get sent back because one stamp or signature is missing or incorrect. The protagonist, finally, gets to the front, gets the papers stamped...and then has no idea what to do. He goes back to the end of the queue, despite having no need to.
- Discussed by Eragon in The Inheritance Cycle, where he briefly wonders what he will do after the war with Galbatorix is over. He notes that after enjoying the excitement and glories of being a Dragon rider, the thought of returning to his old and dull life as a Farm Boy terrifies him. By the end of the series, he decides to leave Alagaesia altogether to train the next generation of Dragon riders.
- J. R. R. Tolkien drafted a Lord of the Rings sequel, The New Shadow, where he explored just how dullsville post-War of the Ring life would be like for those who had experienced such exciting times.
- In the The Lost Fleet series, the Alliance and the Syndicate have been at war for a little over a hundred years. As such, the main character (Who spent 99 years, 11 months and change as a Human Popsicle starting from the end of the first battle) is literally the only person on either side who can remember a time when there wasn't a war going on. The fact that nobody knows how to handle peacetime is a major plot point in the sequel series.
- The question rises at the end of The Malloreon, as the Event that everything was building towards has come and gone. The Prophecy informs Belgarion that his new job is to help the world settle into a new monotheism under Eriond, as the other gods are moving on to other worlds. It also adds that, after spending the past two decades constantly under threat of death, he and his friends should relish the boredom for a bit.
- The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma, the final book of the series prior to its Trilogy Creep, has the members of the society discussing this. With their big mission complete and the Big Bad finally firmly in jail and out of power, Constance Contraire in particular worries that their lives are about to become very boring and they won't even have anything to talk about, other than the weather. Reynie Muldoon, however, ever the optimist, thinks that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, noting that it's a beautiful day outside.
- Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. He gets to go back to the Magical Land, though. The whole book revolves around the idea that the price of getting what you want is getting what you wanted.
- Jo Walton's short story "Relentlessly Mundane" goes into merciless detail on this subject. To add insult to injury, they've lost all the skills they had in the other world.
- Louise Glück's poem "Parable of the Greeks" posits that after winning the Trojan War, the Greek soldiers felt adrift and derived of purpose, and that they would forever miss the thrills they had in Troy.
- At the end of book three of Secret of the Unicorn Queen, Sheila gets to go home. By page two of book four, she's decided she can't focus on algebra and baseball, or her "normal life", so she goes back.
- The last of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books has this as a central theme; after a quarter of a century of bloody warfare, Europe is finally at peace - and the world is full of old soldiers who have done nothing but fight their entire adult lives. Many of them have come to enjoy it. So what next? Two solutions are presented; you can either head for South America and join the first rebellion you come across, or you can do what Sharpe does and walk away. The TV series solves the problem by sending him to India.
- Norton Juster's book (and the cartoon based off of said book) The Phantom Tollbooth ends with Milo returning home. The next day, after school, he rushes back home to return to the tollbooth... and finds it's disappeared. In its place is a note saying it's moved on to the next kid that needs a dose of the fantastic, but that Milo knows how to find it. (Presumably this means his imagination.) After a moment's thought, he smiles and admits he does know how... and he doesn't need to go back just yet, there's so much to do where he is now!
- In the concluding short-story in Solo Kill by Kye Boult, baron Amarson's pseudo-feline warrior race faces a troubling future when a violent conflict lasting for generations reaches its end. Amarson realizes that unless he can create a meaningful alternative for his people, they will perish from ennui.
- In the Vorkosigan Saga. Miles found himself constantly increasing his challenges every time he succeeded, and realized it was becomes of "So What Do I Do Now?" He gave it a name: "playing wall". He was forcibly divorced from his Naismith identity in Memory, which allowed him to get over his rut.
- This is the premise of the Wayward Children series in a nutshell. The story is all about what happens to children who pass through a Door into a magical land where they can truly be themselves (whoever that might be), but then for one reason or another return to our world (some are kicked out, some have things they must do in this world before they can return for good, and some simply fall through a door back just as they fell through their door in the first place) and have to live in a world where they no longer belong.
- At the end of E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, after the heroes' final victory, they are feasting in their hall, feeling melancholy over their inability to complete any more great deeds, when one of their powerful magical allies offers them a gift for helping her earlier. They wish for the villain and his henchmen to be resurrected so they can fight him again, rather than being bored, finding some other adventures, or turning on each other.
