The main cost of a corporate job lies in the fact that you feel constantly drained by it, in terms of time, but also energy and ambition. Forty hours a week might not constitute a huge amount of time, 1 but in practice people working at corporate jobs tend to zone out and passively consume in their "free" time. All of this suggests to me that the common wisdom of pursuing a "safe path" through careerism and corporate jobs is seriously short-sighted, because it does not take into account the real danger of being constantly drained by activities which are not aligned with what you want out of life.
The whole concept of burnout is already suspect, like the vast majority of ideas in the broader collective, because it puts all the blame on the individual and not the environment they are a part of. Human beings love to be useful and work on specific tasks they know can impact things they care about. One of the biggest psyops of the modern world is people in power convincing themselves and others that humans are somehow inherently lazy and need methods of subjugation and punishment to do just about anything. They do become lazy if they cannot work for themselves, if all their work is funneled into making someone else richer, and if they do not feel any personal connection to their environment. In other words, they become lazy because they do not feel the intrinsic reward of genuine work, and if they do not reap its benefits.
I do not want to focus solely on work here, but it is undeniably one of the biggest source of aliveness drains. There is a sense I get from people who are deep in the corporate work that they have somehow resigned from life. Whenever they do something which is supposed to break up their routine, such as going on a holiday, somehow it has the same sense of duty and anxiety—needing to check locations off a mental list—or fear of unpredictability.
You might have also seen people on the internet who have acquired a great deal of money from their jobs, in the goal of retiring early for instance, but even when they reach their goal—which doesn't always happen because they always need more and more money, more safety—they often struggle with ... enjoying life. It's like they have lived so long with the mindset of acquiring and struggling against a job that they have forgotten about their life!
Other notable examples of aliveness drains that come to my mind are
A simple test for what constitutes an aliveness drain is the good old Marie Kondo question: "Does this spark joy?" But instead of expecting an answer from one's mind, it's better to listen to the body. It is quite surprising how many ways the body expresses its needs if we are simply willing to listen to it. I have been suggested to experiment with a few simple prompts, such as "give me a 'yes'" and "give me a 'no'" if I ever found it difficult to "listen" to it, and those are quite effective at establishing a basic communication to your own body, though over time you learn to simply be the body, as opposed to needing to treat it as a separate entity you need to communicate with.
A deep sense of aliveness is something I have lacked for most of my life, but never realized to what extent I deeply wanted it. In hindsight, I would have probably framed most life advice to my younger self as "pursue what makes you feel alive" rather than anything to do with "know yourself" or "do what makes you happy", because even though the latter two point to something in the direction of aliveness, they come with their set of problems.
For one, you can keep doing introspection work for seemingly forever and "get lost in the mirror" so to speak. Without any sense of direction, I find that introspection can circle around forever. Contrast that with how visceral the sense of aliveness manifests in your body and what it tells you: for me it's in my belly, which tenses when it says "no" and feels energized when it says "fuck yes!". Secondly, happiness is great, but is easily swayed by the inevitable difficulties in life, whereas aliveness can thrive under certain difficulties, such as the ones that feel important and manageable.
No advice is ever complete however, and it's easy to imagine someone who feels very alive while engaging in behaviors that harms them or others. Aliveness very much has a fiery quality, it's about connecting with our inner fire which compels us to do this or that, as if life experience was a kind of fuel, but by itself fire can become unbalanced, which is why it needs the soothing quality of Love and connection.
Some people can feel very alive by manifesting their ambitions, getting richer and expanding their businesses, but this type of process can feel very hollow if it is not connected to something higher than mere aliveness. As expanded in the previous post, I think this is perhaps the worst failure mode of the Schopenhauer/Nietzschean will, when it is taken to its extreme: someone who is unstoppable but also utterly loveless.
1 Though when you factor in the commute time, forty hours can quickly become fifty, or in some people I've seen, sixty.
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Block Tiredness Soullesswork Aliveness Essayworthy
2025-09-03