But I think it goes deeper than [Bernard] Williams suggests [in his essay]. It's not simply that we'd run out of desires or become someone else. It's that the striving itself, the journey toward what we want, is where the meaning lives. Not in the having, not in the arriving. This is why people who climb Everest, win Academy Awards, or achieve similar ambitions often face depression afterward. The reward wasn't the point. The pursuit was.¹

The danger of the unimaginative capitalist, who does not read literature (please take that broadly to mean also "watching film" or "playing video games") and has received no folk knowledge that imparts the wisdom of humanity, is this unknown destruction of life by avoiding death. Every vampire story is at first a cautionary tale to explain unexplainable phenomena, but, as modernity progresses and more phenomena become explainable (in myriad ways), the vampire becomes the cautionary tale itself: The undead man who no longer lives. Lives in the sense of for something, and so becomes the destruction of everything. Even the destruction of concepts like cleanliness, family, loyalty, and so on.

This is in stark contrast, by the way, to the vampire as queer. The queer monstrosity is outcast from society and so develops new life against or despite society. Anti-life in rejecting what it is that constitutes life. (This is not to say the capitalist is queer, far from it. The capitalist cannot be queer in a conceptual sense because the capitalist is only a creation of the system which produces it—the same system that destroys queers.)

Anyway, about the first kind, Marx called them vampires, too.