There’s a common idea that stepping away from politics is a way to remain neutral, as if opting out places you somewhere outside the system, untouched by it. I understand the impulse. Politics is goddamn exhausting, loud, and ugly, and wanting distance can feel like the only sane response.
But politics doesn’t pause when you stop engaging. Outcomes continue, decisions are still made, and power moves around you whether or not you are watching. Everything is affected by politics, for better or for worse.
Not participating in politics isn’t the absence of participation, it’s participation without agency.
Power doesn’t tolerate empty space. Power fills vacuums. When people disengage, the vacuum isn’t left open or undecided but is instead filled by those who are more organized, motivated, and persistent. Historically, that’s rarely a neutral group. It’s usually people who already have power, want more power, and are willing to shape systems to keep it.
This isn’t abstract. Laws still get written, budgets still get allocated, and policing, borders, labor conditions, surveillance, housing, and healthcare all keep moving. Opting out doesn’t exempt you from the consequences; it only removes your input while everything proceeds anyway.
Loss of rights also rarely arrives all at once. It’s incremental and uneven, tending to land first on people with the least protection while others are told nothing has really changed. By the time the effects are obvious to everyone, the mechanisms are already in place and normalized.
Another complication is that many people are never taught to recognize their own interests in the first place. Interests are shaped by upbringing, education, media, economic pressure, fear, and habit, so disengagement does not free someone from influence. It simply makes it easier for someone else to define their needs, values, and limits for them.
This is why disengagement so often benefits right-wing or authoritarian movements. These movements don’t require mass agreement; they rely on asymmetry, discipline, and the quiet withdrawal of people who believe opting out is a form of refusal, when in practice it leaves the field uncontested.
Participation doesn’t have to mean faith in institutions. It doesn’t have to mean voting, party loyalty, or believing the system is just, or just is the way it is. Participation can take many forms, including organizing, mutual aid, refusal, disruption, or building alternatives, but total disengagement is not resistance. It’s absence.
If you don’t help shape the world you live in, you’ll live inside a world shaped by people who do not have your interests or your freedoms in mind.