Life Is Worry-Free, Yet the Mind Feels a Lasting Emptiness

Earning several hundred thousand a month, with a stable partner and an easy job, yet giving up even a ten-year fitness habit and unable to muster the energy to go anywhere on days off. Many office workers say that after reaching what society sees as success, they instead fall into an unspeakable emptiness, feeling that each day's repetitive labour merely buys enough to survive, and that the individual is like a cog ground smooth.

This loss of drive and absence of meaning among high-functioning people sits between an ordinary emotional low and clinical depression, yet the existing medical and counselling systems are geared mainly towards crisis intervention and rarely offer support for this group, who can still go to work as normal but have long lost any inner sense of fulfilment. When material conditions become decoupled from psychological satisfaction, the pursuit of meaning itself becomes a long-neglected gap in need.