When he is given three wishes, Jonas, the protagonist in Thomas Glavinic’s Das Leben der Wünsche (2009), proclaims his desire »to be more alive.« He wants to be less inactive, keener for new activities, and he wants to understand life as such. Glavinic’s novel tells the story of how Jonas’s only wish–that all his wishes may come true–comes true. To explain the catastrophic consequences of this deal the paper refers to Kant’s differentiation of will and wish, because Jonas’s wishes will cost a lot of human lives–which he doesn’t want. On the one hand he overcomes his idleness, and, at the same time, he is fighting the thought that the ›death intensity‹ around him might be a consequence of his own new ›life intensity.‹ Furthermore, the novel presents life intensity as an aesthetic effect generated by different media constellations. By all this the text points to an economics of living according to which an invigorating feeling of living presents a transition to dying and, for the gain of ›life intensity,‹ a loss of ›life extensity.‹