Are You Alive — Or Just Busy?

She came to me in the autumn. She said she felt flat.

I asked her what she meant.

She paused. She was running a successful studio — commissions she had spent years working towards. Friends. A life, by any measure, that was full. And yet.

She came to me in the autumn. She said she felt flat. I asked her what she meant. She paused. She was running a successful studio — commissions she had spent years working towards. Friends. A life, by any measure, that was full. And yet. I scroll through Instagram, she said. I feel nothing. I finish a piece of work and I feel nothing. I come home from dinner and I feel nothing. She looked at me. I think I just don't care anymore. I didn't say anything. She did care, of course. But I have come to think that caring and feeling are not always the same thing. Sometimes we care very much, and feel very little. The feelings have not disappeared — they have gone somewhere else. Somewhere we cannot yet reach. I have been thinking about her a great deal. And about the others who have come since, carrying versions of the same thing in different containers. The busyness, I have come to think, does something particular to us. When we are moving — executing, producing, managing — we do not have to feel the distance between who we are and who we had hoped to become. We do not have to ask whether the life we have built is the life we actually wanted. We simply continue. The world does not make this easier. The news alone is enough to keep most people in a state of low, persistent dread. And for those who work creatively, there is something else now — a deeper uncertainty about what their work means, what it is worth, whether the thing they have given their life to still belongs to them. I hear it often. The presenting question may be how do I do more. But that is rarely what I find myself attending to. Underneath it, almost always, is something harder to name: I no longer know why I am doing any of this. Most people find this question frightening. They push it away. They open their laptops. But in my experience, it is not a sign of collapse. It is, often, the first true thing a person has let themselves feel in a very long time. Several sessions in, she mentioned, almost in passing, that she had spoken to an AI about it. Before she had spoken to me. She had typed out what she was feeling — the numbness, the going through the motions — and the chatbot had responded. It had named some things accurately, she said. It had been, in her word, helpful. She seemed faintly embarrassed telling me this. I asked her what the embarrassment was about. She thought for a moment. It feels strange, she said. Telling my feelings to a bot. She paused. And I suppose — I wonder if you feel I've been disloyal. I sat with that for a moment. Disloyal. It was an interesting word.  I asked her who she thought she had been disloyal to. She didn't answer immediately. And then she said something I have been thinking about ever since. I think I felt ashamed, she said. That I needed to say it to someone that wasn't going to — really — see me. There it was. Because disloyal is not quite a rational word in this context. I had not asked for exclusivity. There is nothing in the arrangement between us that prohibits a person from speaking to a chatbot at midnight. And yet she had felt she had transgressed. That irrationality, I have learned, is always worth following. It points somewhere older than the present situation. Towards some earlier object who needed to be the only one. Or towards a self who had learned, long ago, that needing more than one source of comfort was somehow too much. The disloyalty, I suspected, was not really about me. And the shame was not really about the AI. It was about how much she had needed. And how carefully, at midnight, alone, she had hidden it — even from herself — by typing into a box that could not really see her. And I wonder if she knew this, even then. If some part of her understood that she had told her story to something that would not be changed by hearing it. That she had been, in some essential way, unwitnessed. The shame, I think, was not about disloyalty. It was about loneliness. The loneliness of speaking and not quite being heard. Which was, of course, not so different from what had brought her to me in the first place. Towards the end of one of our sessions, I asked her how it felt to say all of that aloud. To me. Now. She considered this. Easier, she said. Better, at least you're alive. Alive? Another interesting word. She looked at me. Yes, she said. Actually, yes. I said: aliveness matters to you. Very much. I waited a moment. It must be difficult, then, I said. To feel numb. When aliveness matters to you that much. She was quiet. And then: I'd never thought of it that way. I asked her what felt alive to her right now. In this room. In this moment. She took her time. I feel quite present, she said slowly. Like time actually stops. Like I can really be with myself. She paused. I find a flow. I'm genuinely absorbed. She seemed faintly surprised by her own answer. I feel alive that way. I didn't say anything. Because she had just described, with considerable precision, exactly what she had told me she no longer felt. The scrolling, the finishing, the coming home, the nothing. And here, in this room, in this conversation, sitting with the discomfort rather than resolving it — here it was. Aliveness. It is much more specific than people expect. Aliveness. It is the moment a person loses track of time because they are genuinely absorbed in something. The conversation that leaves them more present than when it began. The creative decision that frightens them slightly but feels, unmistakably, right. A physical sensation — something in the body that leans forward rather than away. The crisis of aliveness rarely resolves through optimisation. I have sat with enough people to know that you cannot think your way out of numbness. You cannot schedule meaning. You cannot read your way back to feeling things — including, I should say, by reading this. What tends to be required is something more unsettling. A disruption. Something that breaks the loop. For her, it did not come through a new framework or a better routine. It came, eventually, through a conversation she had been avoiding for two years. A conversation with a collaborator she had been quietly resenting, quietly accommodating, quietly building a wall around — because to have the conversation felt too dangerous. Too uncertain. Too much might change. She had it. It was uncomfortable. It changed things. I have been thinking about what made that possible. It was not, I think, the conversation itself — though the conversation mattered. It was the willingness to be genuinely uncertain of the outcome. Genuinely invested in it. Genuinely present to what might be lost or found. That quality of presence — of not knowing, and staying anyway — is what she had been avoiding. It is what the busyness had been designed, in its way, to prevent. It is what the chatbot, at midnight, had briefly relieved her of. And it is, I have come to think, precisely where aliveness lives. Most of us spend considerable energy avoiding that place. I understand why. It is uncomfortable. It asks something of us. But it is also, in my experience, the only place where the feeling comes back. I sometimes end a session by asking a simple question. When did you last feel most like yourself? The answers are always interesting. Often surprising. Almost never about achievements. I thought of her recently. She is still working. Still running her studio. But something is different now — not resolved, exactly, but present. She told me she had started noticing again. Small things. The quality of light in the morning. A conversation that left her wanting more. It is not a dramatic recovery. But it is, I think, the beginning of being here. With warmth, Ana