What if your life force has been the hidden currency all along?
You’re tired.
Not just end-of-the-day tired, but soul-deep weary.
The kind of exhaustion no amount of sleep, coffee, or meditation can touch.
You try to relax, but your mind won’t slow down. You take a break, but the to-do list stretches longer than your breath, crowding out the stillness you crave. You catch up on chores, squeeze in a walk, maybe go “out-out,” pour a glass of wine, scroll a little, binge a show – anything to feel something different.
But the fatigue never fully leaves.
Because maybe…
This tiredness isn’t a personal failure.
Maybe it’s the cost of a system that runs on your life force.
From the moment we arrive on Earth, we are quietly ushered onto the conveyor belt of productivity:
Go to school.
Get good grades.
Choose a career.
Be productive.
Retire, if you make it that far.
It’s sold as stability, but it is programming. And beneath the neat packaging of “success” lies a sobering truth:
Your value has been measured by your output, not your essence. Your worth, determined by your productivity – not your presence.
This is not merely dehumanising. It is desouling.
And this isn’t just about work. It touches everything – how we relate, how we rest, even how we love.
Like cattle, we are quietly herded. In one system, the cow is valued for its milk. In another, the human becomes the stock – a living asset, a cash cow, feeding a structure that disguises dependency as opportunity.
The word stock is no accident. It traces back not just to livestock or financial markets, but to colonial and imperial days – where both animals and humans were catalogued, traded, and taxed. And further still, to times long forgotten, when other beings arrived on this Earth not to honour life, but to harness it – seeding systems of control beneath the guise of order and progress.
These are hierarchical structures of worth and value that still echo through our lives today.
The Hidden Cost of Modern Life
We’re told the stock market trades in products, services, and innovation. But what it really trades in is time. Energy. Life force.
Your hours. Your attention. Your emotional labour.
Each spreadsheet, customer service smile, creative campaign, and exhausted commute is a sacrament on the altar of an invisible god – Productivity. And you are expected to give these offerings without question.
This is not just exploitation.
It is energetic grooming.
And the soul is the commodity.
Not all vampires wear fangs. Some wear lanyards. Others wear smiles. But the greatest siphoning doesn’t come from faces — it comes from structures.
It’s not the vampire we see in stories — but the slow, quiet draining of life force over time. A system that rewards effort, but rarely nurtures essence.
That praises productivity, but forgets presence.
You may not even realise the extent of what’s been given away… until you reach the later chapters of life and wonder:
“Did I truly live as me?”
This is not to condemn.
It is to remind you that your light was never meant to be farmed.
And that there is still time.
Time to choose.
Time to return to your own current.
Time to live as the real you…. now.
Consumerism = Soul Consumption
From a young age, we are trained to believe that value comes from what we can produce and what we can purchase.
We’re taught to:
Buy brands to feel beautiful.
Achieve status to feel seen.
Accumulate wealth to feel safe.
Consume pleasure to cope with pain.
But what if all of this was designed to keep you hungry for something you already are?
Because while you are buying worth, the true YOU – the essence, joy, creativity, and magic of your soul – is being siphoned into roles you never chose. Into systems that were never built to hold your light.
This is the great lie:
“Work hard. Play hard. Buy more. And slowly be drained until you die.”
All the while forgetting who you truly are, until only a shadow of your true self remains.
I Know This Lie, Because I Lived It
The illusion had cracked long before, but this was the moment I truly felt like a cog in a wheel, a number not a living being, and the stirrings of my soul became impossible to ignore.
I had just been made redundant from a role in the television industry. At first, I thought it would be simple – pack my things and leave with dignity, like others before me. But instead, they asked me to stay on temporarily, to cover someone else’s maternity leave. The words they used stayed with me: “It would be in your best interests to secure a favourable reference…”
They also told me I should be grateful – after all, many people would love to work in television. And I was. On the surface, it all sparkled, and I had enjoyed much of my time there: the friendships, the parties, the fast-paced culture. But over time, something began to feel hollow. Beneath the polished sets and curated smiles was a culture built more on performance than on presence.
That night, I sat with the discomfort. I asked myself a question I’d rarely asked in all my years of chasing success:
“But what about me? What about what I want?”
The next day, I returned with clarity. I declined. Politely, but firmly. They had made me redundant. That chapter was over. And I chose to walk forward – into the unknown, yes – but also into the truth of my own becoming.
Not long after, I left the corporate world entirely.
It wasn’t a clean break. The system has claws, and earning a living outside of it became a struggle. There were days of doubt. Nights of wondering whether I had made a mistake. But underneath it all, a deeper knowing pulsed through me: this was my soul path.
And over time, I discovered something even more precious than a stable salary:
I discovered alignment.
The kind of inner guidance that can’t be bought or outsourced. The kind of truth that steadies you when everything around you seems to be collapsing. It wasn’t my productivity that saved me. It wasn’t my bank account or titles. It was my ability to listen. To trust. To stay.
Even in the darkest hours, I chose to remain loyal to the quiet voice within.
And that voice led me here.
This pattern of disguised support would appear again later — not in a corporate boardroom, but in spaces that claimed to help the soul-led entrepreneur. I didn’t yet know how to protect what was sacred… but that lesson was coming.
And it isn’t just the business world.
Some spiritual organisations mirror the same architecture – subtle hierarchies, energetic debts disguised as devotion, and help that comes with hidden contracts.
The structure shifts, but the siphoning remains – unless we choose to see.
The Deeper Deception
Later, as I pursued a path in documentary filmmaking, I began meeting survivors of human trafficking. Their stories cracked something open in me. One woman trafficked as a child by her own parents to Hollywood Studios to help pay the mortgage. Another – a Black lady who had been placed in foster care with a military family. A third had escaped the confines of a religious cult.
At first, I thought these were isolated extremes – shocking, yet rare. But the deeper I listened, the clearer it became:
This wasn’t just happening ‘out there’. It was happening everywhere.
Modern slavery isn’t always chains and cages. Sometimes it’s contracts, compliance, and the quiet surrender of self – masked as professionalism, devotion, or survival. It lives in our workplaces, our families, our institutions. It hides in the places we’ve been taught to trust.
And often, we don’t even know we’re inside it.
Because for many, it’s all we’ve ever known.
When the System Stops Making Sense
It often begins as a whisper.
A sense that something’s off, even if you can’t explain it.
The job you once worked so hard for now feels hollow.
The routines that used to feel productive now drain your spirit.
The praise you once sought feels empty, or worse – binding.
You start to wonder…
Is this really all there is?
You were told that fulfilment would come from success.
That security would arrive after sacrifice.
That value could be earned by proving yourself – again and again.
But what if the reason it all feels so heavy is because it was never designed for your soul?
What if the system that promised purpose was quietly pulling you away from your path?
From your presence.
From your gifts.
From the very reason you came here.
Because when life becomes a checklist of productivity, we forget how to listen.
And when we forget how to listen, we forget how to live.
A Gentle Return Home
You don’t have to abandon your life.
You don’t have to burn it all down.
But maybe there’s another way forward.
A way that honours your essence, not just your output.
A way that allows your creativity to breathe again.
A way that reawakens the joy that’s been waiting, patiently, beneath the surface.
This isn’t about quitting your job or moving to the mountains (unless you want to).
It’s about remembering the part of you that was never here to be measured – only expressed.
What if the most radical thing you could ever do…was simply to stop feeding what drains you?
You have always been more than a role.
More than a title.
More than what you do for others.
Your soul didn’t come here to be efficient.
It came to be true.
With a discerning heart,
Victoria
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