Participation, Optional

New York is a mess right now.

Last week’s snowstorm left behind that specific brand of gray slush that’s neither solid nor liquid - just slippery, unavoidable, and vaguely hostile. Sidewalks are treacherous. Curb puddles look radioactive. And it’s bitter cold in that way where the temperature technically moves, but emotionally it’s frozen in place.

We’re not breaking above freezing for weeks. Which, honestly, feels about right.

Everything feels stuck while the rest of us are just trying to get where we’re going without wiping out. You keep your head down, pick your steps carefully, and hope your Blundstones were a good investment.

It’s not poetic. It’s practical. And lately, that’s exactly how the world has felt.

This week, my brain felt like a browser with too many tabs open.

Egg drama. A soda jingle I can’t get out of my head. The NYC mayor casually suggesting you listen to the Heated Rivalry audiobook during a snowstorm. Breaking news banners stacked on top of each other. Hot takes demanding urgency. Everything insisting it deserves my reaction now.

Some of it matters (mostly Heated Rivalry). Some of it very much does not. And lately, it’s been harder than usual to tell the difference.

It made me wonder how easily attention can be hijacked. How quickly urgency can be manufactured. How often I’m reacting before I’ve actually decided whether something is worth reacting to at all.

Outrage feels active. It feels like participation. But more and more, it’s starting to feel like motion without traction.

I think part of why this all feels so destabilizing is that I’m a millennial, which means I’ve spent most of my adult life doing what I was told was responsible.

Stay informed. Participate. Work hard. Buy in. Build a life inside the system, not outside of it.

That logic carried me through school, early careers, adulthood, and eventually parenthood. And now I’m standing here - with a job, a kid, and a mortgage-sized sense of responsibility - realizing that participation isn’t neutral. That opting in has consequences. And that the systems we trusted to be stable feel anything but.

We were also taught that staying calm was a virtue. That if we did the inner work, stayed grounded, said the right things, everything else would sort itself out. To be clear, those practices have helped me more than once. I’m not dismissing them.

But this week they felt incomplete. Like tools designed for coping, not deciding.

Because calm isn’t the same as clarity. And feeling aligned isn’t the same as taking responsibility.

There’s a growing discomfort in realizing that this isn’t just background noise - that this is a moment that will eventually be named, explained, and taught. And that the question won’t be how centered we felt while living through it, but what we actually chose to do.

That realization is unsettling. And it’s also clarifying.

I was talking to someone at work this week. We’d both heard about a RIF at a previous employer when they joked that RIF actually stands for relocation into freedom.

I laughed - and then realized I hadn’t heard anything more honest all week.

We treat jobs, subscriptions, routines, and systems like security blankets. We tell ourselves we’re choosing them, when really we’re afraid of what happens if we stop participating. And when that participation is taken away from us, we call it loss - even when it quietly creates space we didn’t know we needed.

That reframe stuck with me, because it put words to something I’ve been circling for a while now: what if opting out isn’t failure? What if sometimes it’s freedom we didn’t plan for?

At the same time all of this has been swirling, I’ve been feeling a deep heaviness watching what’s been unfolding in Minnesota.

Not just because of what happened — but because of the familiarity of it. I was born and raised in Wisconsin. Minnesota has always felt like a neighbor you understand instinctively. I know the DNA of the people who show up for their city, who care deeply about community, who refuse to disengage even when it would be easier to look away.

And sitting with that weight, I kept coming back to the same question: what can I actually do?
How do I move beyond feeling outraged or heartbroken and into something that might actually be heard?

That’s when a familiar idea clicked into place - one I’ve been circling for a while now. Outrage isn’t the lever. Behavior is.

If you’ve been with me here for a while, you know I often find clarity through the work of Scott Galloway. This week, his framing helped sharpen something I couldn’t quite articulate: real resistance isn’t rhetorical. It’s behavioral.

You don’t yell louder. You change how you participate.

Cancel subscriptions. Pause spending. Withhold attention and money from systems that rely on your quiet compliance - not for a day, but long enough to be felt.

That idea landed because it wasn’t ideological. It was practical.

I believe in capitalism. I also believe in decorum - in decency, in rules, in laws. And right now, it feels like economic participation has been treated as a given. Automatic. Unquestioned. Something to be relied on, even when voices go silent.

Which made me wonder: what if participation didn’t have to be assumed?
What if opting out - intentionally, temporarily - was one of the few ways left to signal that attention, money, and compliance are not unlimited resources?

What if that’s where the leverage actually is?

📢 Shout out to Scott 👇🏼

Starting February 1st - for one month (yes, the shortest month of the year… pshh) - I’m committing to intentionally limiting my economic participation.

I know I’m just one person. But I also know how much modern systems rely on recurring revenue and habitual participation. So for February: no impulse purchases. No unnecessary upgrades. Fewer subscriptions. Fewer “just because” buys.

Short-term inconvenience for me. A long-overdue signal to systems that depend on constant consumption.

Not to burn anything down. But to remind ourselves - and the people counting on our silence - that participation is a choice.

That opting out, even temporarily, is a form of agency.

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I should be filtering my decisions through an I don’t care what anyone thinks lens. There’s freedom in that posture. Relief, even.

But it doesn’t sit right with me anymore.

Because there is someone whose opinion I care deeply about.

My daughter.

I’ll watch her do something completely ordinary - focus intently on a small task, move through the world without context for any of this - and suddenly I’m overwhelmed by the same question:

What will she think of who I was in this moment?

Not just next year. But ten years from now. Twenty.

What will she learn about this period in history? And when she does, what will she learn about me?

I want to be on the right side of history in her eyes, but I’m realizing that isn’t about ideology. It’s about alignment. About whether my actions matched my values when it counted.

Maybe Is This It? isn’t about being louder. Or calmer. Or perfectly informed.

Maybe it’s about choosing where to participate - and where not to.

About recognizing that fear can either paralyze us or clarify us. That opting out isn’t apathy. That behavior, repeated over time, is the loudest signal we have.

I don’t have a clean answer yet. But I do know this: I want my daughter to look back and see someone who didn’t just feel strongly, but acted with intention.

Someone who understood that history isn’t shaped only by grand gestures, but by ordinary decisions made deliberately.

Even in the cold. And especially when it’s messy. Welcome to my life. 

The weekly section where I will call out a fraction: something that felt like progress this week (like a fraction forward) and a fiction: something that turned out to be a distraction or illusion. 

📌 In case you were wondering what I was referring to earlier in Everything Wants a Reaction…

This week’s fraction forward goes to the new Dr Pepper jingle (and not just because Diet Dr Pepper remains my emotional support beverage).

What I love about it isn’t the catchiness (though it is stuck in my head). It’s the origin story. A TikTok creator made something playful, it resonated, and a massive brand actually listened. The result? A national commercial and a life-changing moment for someone who wasn’t part of the usual pipeline.

It’s a small reminder that sometimes voices break through. That participation can still matter. That once in a while, the system responds — not to outrage, but to creativity.

A fraction forward. But a real one.

Suddenly they’re expensive and ethically fraught - the rare grocery item that manages to feel like a luxury purchase and a moral compromise at the same time. We’re told it’s about supply chains and market forces, while quietly ignoring the cruelty that made this whole thing feel off in the first place.

Somewhere out there, I hope a chicken knows this isn’t normal. That silence is no longer an option. That they’re owed serious back pay — and maybe a well-timed tell-all.

A lot of discourse. Very little accountability. And somehow I’m still standing in the dairy aisle wondering how eggs became this complicated.

For Those Paying Attention

If this felt worth opting into, help me keep it going. Share it on social, forward it to three friends, or leave a comment below. Your attention — chosen on purpose — is what makes this work.

Until next Friday,
Chris

P.S. In a week about choosing how we participate, this is one tool that feels intentionally designed. Wispr Flow helps turn thoughts into words without friction - which feels especially useful when clarity matters.

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