You've doubtless seen me comment about the Watcher at the Threshold. This is among the forms the Watcher takes -- the terrible vision of an empty, lifeless, meaningless world of meat objects lurching through automatic routines. It's a known landscape along the inner path, and it indicates that you've made some definite progress on that path.

The only way out is through. Keep doing your practices, remember that the Watcher is a transitory phenomenon, and you'll come out the other side into a world of renewed life and meaning. Stop, and you stay where you are.

That style of debased American Buddhism, by the way, is very much reworked for the sake of productivity -- that's why corporations push it so hard. I don't recommend it to anyone who wants to be more than a lifelong corporate slave.