An evil life is a kind of death.

Something can go out in a person long before anything medical happens. Living in a way you cannot look at directly requires a steady low-level shutting down: fewer honest conversations, less feeling, a smaller set of people you can be around without managing yourself. The deadness is not a punishment applied from outside; it is what that much internal editing costs.

Not every numbness comes from this: grief, exhaustion and depression are not moral failings, and they deserve care rather than scrutiny. But where the dulling follows something you know you have been doing against your own sense of right, the reverse also runs. Setting one thing right, even a small one, tends to restore more feeling than any amount of trying to feel more.