Aliveness is not a solo project

I've been sitting with something Esther Perel said this week that I haven't quite been able to put down.

She was talking about aliveness, not as a mood or a mindset, but as a quality of being. Vitality. Presence. The felt sense of being genuinely inhabited in your own life. And she was making the case, firmly and with her usual precision, that aliveness is not something we generate alone. It is co-created. It lives, she said, in the space between people. In genuine contact. In the experience of being truly met by another person.

I kept thinking about the clients I work with.

Most of them have built something real. They operate in complex, high-pressure environments. They make decisions that matter. By almost any external measure, their lives are full, full of work, full of responsibility, full of people who depend on them. And yet, somewhere in that fullness, something has gone quiet.

It doesn't look like depression. It doesn't feel like burnout, at least not yet. It's more like a slow dimming. A growing distance between themselves and the things that used to move them. They're still functioning, often brilliantly, but they're doing it from behind glass.

That specific kind of flatness is one of the least talked about experiences in high-performance environments, and one of the most common.

There is a clinical framework that helps explain what's happening.

Self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, identifies three basic psychological needs that underpin human vitality and wellbeing: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Relatedness is the need to feel genuinely connected, to matter to others and to have them matter to you. When it's satisfied, we experience what SDT calls subjective vitality: a felt sense of energy, aliveness, and capacity. When it goes unmet over time, vitality decreases. Not in an abstract sense. In a visceral, embodied one.

High-performers tend to have strong autonomy and competence. Those two needs often get fed, sometimes overfed, by the nature of the work. But relatedness is more complicated. It asks for something that most high-pressure roles actively penalise: real vulnerability, genuine contact, the willingness to be met rather than just managed.

The result is a profile that appears self-sufficient and is, in important ways, relationally starved.

A 2024 study published in Personnel Psychology analysed over nine thousand Reddit posts from entrepreneurship communities, specifically about loneliness. What researchers found was that founders and operators are uniquely vulnerable, not just because they spend a lot of time working alone, but because of the structure of the role itself. You cannot show fear to the team without undermining their confidence. You cannot unload on investors who need to believe in you. Your partner loves you but doesn't live inside the specific weight of what you carry. You become, in the words of more than one CEO who has spoken publicly about it, a title rather than a person. Someone people relate to rather than connect with.

Harvard Business Review data puts it bluntly: fifty percent of CEOs experience significant loneliness, and sixty-one percent say it directly impairs their performance.

And yet loneliness is rarely what brings someone to this kind of work. It tends to surface sideways, as irritability, as emotional distance, as a flatness that they can't quite explain.

What Perel adds to this picture is something the clinical literature doesn't always name so precisely: that the loss of aliveness is a relational loss, even when it doesn't look like one.

Her argument is that aliveness isn't a state you reach by working on yourself hard enough. It's not a product of better routines or cleaner thinking. It emerges in contact, in moments where you're genuinely present with another person and they are genuinely present with you. Where you don't have to manage the interaction. Where something real gets exchanged.

A 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that what predicts wellbeing isn't the quantity of social interactions but their diversity, having different kinds of relationships, including some that don't serve a professional function, including connections where you aren't the expert or the authority or the one responsible for what happens next.

That last part is worth sitting with. Most people in high-responsibility roles have a deeply contracted social portfolio. Their interactions are predominantly professional, predominantly purposeful, predominantly ones where they are, in some way, performing. The kind of contact that feeds aliveness, loose, reciprocal, without agenda, becomes rarer and rarer, often without anyone noticing it's gone.

There's an internal dimension to this that's worth naming too.

Somewhere in the process of becoming good at operating under pressure, most high-performers develop a version of themselves that is competent, composed, and remarkably self-contained. That version is genuinely useful. It gets things done. It doesn't fall apart in meetings. But it can also become the only self that shows up, including in relationships that were never supposed to require that kind of performance.

Over time, without anyone intending it, the distance between who you are at work and who you are with the people who matter most quietly closes, not because you've brought more of yourself to work, but because the work self has expanded to fill most of the available space.

This isn't a failure of character. It's what happens when connection gets postponed long enough that you lose the habit of it.

Recovering aliveness doesn't require grand relational gestures. It tends to start with much smaller things, moments of genuine attention, conversations that don't have an outcome, allowing yourself to be known in contexts where you're not also managing something.

If this is resonating, the following are worth sitting with, pen and paper, without trying to reach a conclusion.

Think of the last time you felt genuinely met by another person, not praised, not thanked, but actually met. What was present in that conversation that usually isn't?

Consider the relationships in your life right now. In which of them are you most yourself, least performing? How often do you actually give those relationships time?

Think about what you tend not to say, to your partner, to your closest friend, to anyone. Not because it's inappropriate, but because some part of you decided a long time ago that it wasn't useful to say it. What would happen if you said it anyway?

And finally: when did you last let someone do something for you, without immediately redirecting the conversation back to them or finding a way to make yourself useful in return?

Perel's point, and I think she's right, is that aliveness is not a personal achievement. It's not something you optimise your way into. It is what happens when you allow yourself to be in genuine contact with the world and the people in it, when you stop managing the distance and start, even slightly, letting things land.

For people who have spent years becoming very good at not needing anything, that is a genuinely difficult thing to do. It is also, in my experience, where some of the most important work begins.

If something here has opened up a question you'd like to explore, I offer a 15-minute initial consultation to see whether this kind of work might be the right fit. You can book through the contact page.

References:

Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2022). Self-Determination Theory. In Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2022_RyanDeci_SDT_Encyclopedia.pdf

Cardon, M. et al. (2024). The many faces of entrepreneurial loneliness. Personnel Psychology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/peps.12614

Collins, H.K. et al. (2022). Relational diversity in social portfolios predicts well-being. PNAS, 119(43). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2120668119

WHO Commission on Social Connection (2024). From loneliness to social connection: charting a path to healthier societies. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/978240112360

Leader and leadership loneliness: A review-based critique and path to future research (2024). ScienceDirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984324000092

Ryan, R.M. (2025). Motivation, Movement, and Vitality: Self-determination theory perspectives. Pre-print. https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025_Ryan_MotivationMovementVitality_PrePrint.pdf