There is a common paranoiac vision in which certain institutions or authorities are stealing one's life force, like a vampire or some sort of extractive colonizing alien. This vision can be quite true in an indirect way.
For me an easy example consists of the video game industry. I play the occasional video game, which can be useful for simply resting one's mind and body by setting aside various daily concerns and efforts. But past a certain point, one is devoting growing amounts of time and energy into something that essentially evaporates as one turns away from that specific pursuit and turns back to life.
This problem is thrown into greater relief as one goes about conducting one's own life affairs. It takes time, energy, and attention to learn to cook well, or build and maintain one's shelters, or maintain one's living space on the land, or grow food, or gather and process herbs and medicines, and etc.
All the time and energy one puts into one's leisure time takes time and energy away from those other pursuits. It is of course necessary to rest and simply play and enjoy. But there are many forms of play and enjoyment that continue to develop various general skills, like physical condition, techniques, flow states, relationships, knowledge, and all the rest.
Something like a video game is a very specific activity at remove from most life processes. Sure your dexterity and hand eye coordination get better, for starters, and for the higher quality offerings you get to partake in various mythologies and cultural experiences, but then this has to be held against the actual industry's drives and interests, which is more interested in extending play time, purchases, increasing addiction, and so on.
So you're giving more and more time and energy to a specific industry that is eager to command your attention for greater amounts of time, which is then taken away from you, more or less. This all makes sense at an equilibrium, in which you labor in a specific capacity to capture a swathe of life energy, or money, and then spend that energy in the way you see fit, such as toward another specific effort that somebody else is putting in, like putting together a video game.
But there's not an equilibrium. Across every industry, there is a tendency towards concentration and the encouragement of dependency and extraction, even within one's own labor process in the form of a labor alienating and extracting job, and in one's own home in the form of extractive rent.
It's as if one is more and more being sucked dry by eh, distant vampires or aliens.
