You can be fully aliveand still… absent.

Not in body.In awareness. In sensation. In truth.

This is what I call emotional extinction —the slow disappearance of feelingin a life that keeps moving.

It doesn’t happen in one moment.It happens over time.

✧ You stop crying at beauty✧ You stop pausing before you respond✧ You stop asking yourself if you still care✧ You become functional. Efficient. Numb.

And the scary part?

Everyone applauds you for it.

Because our world rewards the material —what we can show, measure, produce.

But none of those things feel alive without feeling.

That’s the great illusion:A life can look fulland be completely hollow inside.

So maybe death isn’t when the body stops.Maybe it’s when your experience of yourself goes silentinside a life that still performs like everything is fine.

✧ quiet prompt:

What part of you has been functioning… but not feeling?

🌒 go deeper:

→ read: the neuroscience of aliveness, affective flattening, and internal deadness → chapter: decoding

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