Life & Mortality Quote by Raoul Vaneigem

The line lands like a dare aimed at the mid-century triumphalism that treated material security as history's finish line. Vaneigem, a Situationist writing in the shadow of postwar European prosperity, punctures the welfare-state promise with a venomous trade-off: survival purchased at the price of a flattened life. The sentence is engineered as a provocation. It grants the humanitarian premise (no one should starve) only to twist it into a harsher question: what kind of society solves hunger by engineering passivity?

The subtext is anti-management. "Guarantee" is the tell: a world run by bureaucratic assurances and technocratic planning, where needs are administered and desire is treated as a bug in the system. Starvation stands for brute deprivation; boredom stands for the quieter violence of a consumer society that fills time with commodities, routines, and pseudo-choices. Dying of boredom is hyperbole, but it's calculated hyperbole: it reframes boredom not as a personal failing but as a social outcome, a slow suffocation produced by work-as-obligation and leisure-as-distraction.

The intent isn't to romanticize hardship; it's to refuse a politics that stops at subsistence. Vaneigem is insisting that liberation can't mean merely being kept alive. It has to include intensity, play, self-direction, the ability to shape one's days beyond the roles assigned by employers, markets, and institutions. The question "Who wants..". is a trap for the reader: if you accept the bargain, you're admitting that the modern order has trained you to confuse safety with freedom.