Small Refusals
In my last blog, I talked about the weakness of the electorate—how our government's failures aren't separate from the people, they're a reflection of us, of the collective drift away from seriousness that defines this moment in American life.
There has been a systemic degradation of the citizenry. Not all at once, and not by a single cause, but steadily, year after year, through a slow infection of passivity, driven by a collective sedation. There’s no conspiracy here, nobody organized this shift. It’s simply the aggregation of millions of personal retreats: a gradual externalization of control, a slow surrender of the belief that our lives are, in any meaningful sense, ours to shape.
We’re given plenty of functionally useless outlets. Booze, pills, and other drugs are the obvious ones. But the quieter ones are more powerful: the engineered distraction economy that allows endless escape without consequence, and a cultivated cynicism, particularly in men, that treats caring about anything as naïve. Larger still is the politicization of grievance that trains people to look everywhere but inward for the source of their discontent.
Sedation doesn't often look like collapse. It looks like drift. A steady dimming of presence, a dulling of urgency, a life spent slightly elsewhere.
And on we churn. Not because anyone designed it perfectly, but because it’s efficient. The world we live in doesn’t need you fully sedated. It just needs enough passivity to keep the gears moving, to keep consumption up, and for us to keep mistaking distraction for engagement.
You can see it in the structures we've built.
At work, sedation looks like endless scaffolding without serious construction: meetings that produce no action, projects that sustain their own inertia without ever asking why they exist. It’s anodyne corporatist language that we mock outside of work.
In politics, sedation takes a different form. We have turned grievance into our core political value, and scattershot outrage into a substitute for governance. We argue endlessly about who’s to blame, who has failed, who must be punished or who owes, but rarely about what must be built, repaired, or preserved. Our leaders, and our online discourse solely seeks retribution—revenge over amorphous evil forces that can never be clearly identified.
This didn’t all start in a bad place. Ever since the financial crisis in 2008, many people, particularly highly educated people, have slowly come around to the realization that the system isn't fully fair. That some groups benefit structurally, creating conditions that make social mobility less simple than it once was. Recognizing that wasn’t the mistake.
The mistake came when we married our entire personal and political philosophy to that realization. When we decided that because systemic problems exist, individual agency mattered little. Or when we decided, quietly, that what the system foists upon us is more important than what we chose to do.
It was a subtle shift, but it created a generation of college-educated people who learned how to critique a system—fluently, often brilliantly—but not how to build a life inside one. This pivot put a premium on reciting the right phrases and sharing the right memes, but cared very little about the works we produce in our own individual lives.
Yes, it’s harder to buy a house. It’s harder to plan a family. It’s harder to imagine stability. But that does not mean we should give up until someone else solves the problem for us. The constraints are real. But constraints don't erase agency.
We still have to make serious choices and take serious actions. We are still responsible for building a life.
Recognizing that doesn't mean pretending the system is fair, nor does it mean ignoring constraint, or hardship, or real injustice. It means refusing to surrender the one thing still fully within reach: the ability to live deliberately.
We can understand the forces that shape our lives without accepting drift as inevitable. We can recognize constraints without abandoning responsibility.
That’s the difference between sedation and agency. And it's the difference that matters now.
I'm not saying we have to reject everything, or disappear into the woods to live some monastic clarity fantasy.
But we have to notice.
Notice how much of our lives have been structured to make serious thought optional. Notice how often dissatisfaction is smoothed over instead of confronted. Notice how easily intention erodes into habit, how quietly drift becomes the norm.
There’s something to Aristotle’s notion that true happiness must come from ourselves, and that excellence comes from good habits. And perhaps the best way to think of it is that if we too often choose empty leisure, or too often choose some other form of easy distraction, we should at least notice that we are making a choice. Perhaps when we see the cost clearly, we will choose it less.
Simone Weil called attention the rarest and purest form of generosity. Today, attention is extracted as a resource, a mere input into systems you do not control and that do not care for you. Protecting it is no longer a luxury. It is the minimum cost of retaining our own moral seriousness.
Reclaiming agency doesn’t require revolution. It begins with small refusals.
Refusing sedation when it is offered—perhaps not every time, but more often than before. Refusing to perform grievance when we recognize there’s no follow through. Refusing to pretend that caring about how we ought to live is a weakness.
This is not a self-help blog.
I'm not going to tell you to meditate more, or practice mindful sobriety, or put your phone down after nine o’clock. Not because those things aren't helpful, but because I’m not going to tell you to do things I don’t do myself. And more importantly, because the acts themselves are ancillary to the intention.
The point isn't a set of habits, it is a reclaiming of agency.
We live in a system shaped by real constraints. But within that system, we still choose how we will live, and we still choose what it means to live well.
These are not glamorous acts. Often they will not feel meaningful. But they will be your acts and your small reclamations of your attention and intention.