A Green former Prime Minister says Germany needs to “really get going again” and that people should be allowed to work 14-hour days.
The outrage was immediate - and strangely revealing.
Which makes me wonder:
have we become allergic not only to exploitation - but also to intensity itself?
To be clear: I’m not interested in glorifying 14-hour workdays. I have seen too many executives and founders confuse exhaustion with commitment, urgency with meaning, and permanent availability with leadership.
But I also think we are avoiding a deeper conversation.
Because beneath all the political noise, I experience something else in many organizations and executive teams:
A growing fatigue.
Not only exhaustion from overload. Sometimes a quiet withdrawal from life itself.
I see highly educated, materially secure people who have slowly outsourced too much of their inner authority: security to the state, meaning to employers, orientation to institutions, emotional stability to external conditions.
And when that happens, energy starts collapsing inward.
The complaining grows louder.
The nostalgia grows stronger.
More and more energy flows into defending the past, protecting familiar structures, preserving identities and systems that may already be losing their relevance.
I see this in companies as well.
Instead of creating the future, enormous energy goes into backward-facing battles, risk avoidance and maintaining comfort.
Not because people are weak.
But because many have lost connection to the sources that actually generate vitality.
In my work, the real differentiator is often not intelligence or competence. It is energy.
Mental energy: the capacity to stay clear instead of drowning in noise.
Emotional energy: staying connected to genuine feeling and vitality instead of becoming numb or cynical.
Physical energy: having a nervous system and body that can actually carry intensity.
Spiritual energy: a felt sense that what we do truly matters.
None of this can be outsourced.
No government, company or institution can cultivate these energies for us.
At some point, it becomes our responsibility to stop waiting for the world to continuously motivate, secure, and energize us - and to consciously participate in generating aliveness again.
When these energies are not cultivated, people may still function for a while.
They attend meetings, answer emails and keep systems running.
But underneath the surface, something slowly starts degenerating: vitality, creativity, courage, depth.
People become externally efficient while inwardly increasingly absent.
And after some years, many no longer know why they are doing any of it.
So maybe the real question is not whether people should work 8, 10 or 14 hours.
The deeper questions are:
What happens to a society when comfort becomes more important than aliveness?
And where, in our own lives, have we quietly stopped generating our own vitality and fully participating in life?