It’s election season, and campaign volunteers are knocking on your door to tell you about their favorite candidate’s platform and slam their opponent in any way they can.
They start rambling on and on about how their candidate will bring about the long-awaited change and prosperity you’ve been hoping for, finally making your country a better and safer place. But they notice that you seem uninterested in what they have to say.
So they turn to a different tactic… they start educating you on the importance of politics in your life and how essential your vote truly is to the bigger picture.
But you’ve heard it all before, haven’t you? How many times have you been told that your vote would directly turn the tides of the race and ensure that the bad guys don’t win?
Your vote will reduce inflation and fix the economy.
Your vote will make your streets safer for you to walk alone at night.
Your vote will transform your army into a strong and powerful one that will defeat all its enemies.
Your vote will create new jobs for you and your friends and you will finally stop worrying about the future.
Every time elections are right around the corner, the world reminds you how interconnected you are with everything. It makes you feel responsible for the country’s problems and threatens you with even more blame if you don’t make the right choice this time.
What they forget is that this is precisely what led you to give up on politics in the first place: the fact that you’re constantly held responsible for everything going on around you while still feeling completely powerless to bring about any real change.
What is portrayed as a celebration of civic participation, in your eyes, seems like a rigged play in which you will always be the loser.
Power Is Invisible Until It Crushes You
You’re not alone in this feeling. Millions of young people around the world are tuning out, prioritizing their mental health over the everyday workings of civil life. What can you even do in the face of such a gigantic machine that seems to control everything?
The media, the military-industrial complex and major industries, politicians and billionaires, banks and stockbrokers — they are the ones with the real power and control after all.
Power.
Eventually, this is what it’s all about.
Getting to a position where you can impose your will on other people.
You know it’s about power. You see it, you feel it every time your landlord increases your rent without explanation. When prices rise in your local grocery store but your paycheck doesn’t. When you graduated college ten years ago and are still paying student debt, dreaming of quitting your job to follow your passion but stuck in a cycle that seems to have no off-ramp.
You scroll through the news and see people yelling at each other, burning out over issues they barely understand, carried along by fear and outrage. Everyone seems angry, but nothing really changes. The people shouting for justice are the same ones still waiting in line for basic rights. You hear them, and you think, “Sheep.”
And they want you to believe that casting a single piece of paper with a name circled on it will bring about any real change?!
Power is invisible — until it crushes you.
It doesn’t look like a villain in a movie. It’s not always a soldier at your door or a dictator on a podium. Most of the time, it looks like an empty promise. A delayed payment. A silent policy. A glitch in the system that somehow only ever works against you. It comes with a smile on its face and statistics to back it up. And by the time you feel it, it’s too late.
Power isn’t just about who’s in office. It’s about who gets to define the rules of the game you didn’t know you were playing. And most of the time, they make sure you never notice that a game is even happening.
That’s why tuning out feels like self-defense. But here’s the twist: they count on it. The more disconnected you are, the freer they are to move.
You don’t have to play their game, but you do need to learn how it works.
The Myth of Individual Responsibility
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
This hopelessness you’re feeling is no coincidence. You’ve been led to believe that you hold no power and that whatever you do, the outcome will remain the same. Given this zero-sum game, it is only logical to decide to invest your time and energy in something meaningful that you can control: yourself and your career.
In a twisted turn of events, your drive for self-improvement ends up playing into the hands of the people who led you to this hopeless state.
You end up serving the economy and working for the very ones who control it, without questioning the rules that structure how it functions or the terms that define the relationship between employers and employees. You keep paying taxes, you’ve just decided not to pay attention to how those taxes keep increasing, or how your money is being spent.
The goal is to “make it”, to create your own path and become a billionaire, just like those who inspired you and demonstrated that success is accessible to everyone. Once you grow your individual power, things will be better and you will have more control over your life.
This reminds me of an animation that went viral during Instagram’s early years, where a suitcase filled with cash is dangled in front of a man, like a carrot in front of a donkey. The man keeps running and running in place, never reaching the object of his desire until he dies and his skeleton falls into a hole that opens up between him and the unreachable suitcase.
Individual ambition is key. Everyone should strive to achieve their own brand of success. Pursuing wealth and financial prosperity is a worthy endeavor that shouldn’t be demonized. However, we must be wary of replacing political action with career growth and individuality.
The people in power know what they are doing. We must also be aware of the game if we are to rise in this world and take a piece of the pie that we deserve.
The purpose here is not to mobilize the working class against the wealthy. This post is not intended to be a leftist manifesto — unless you choose to read it that way.
Practicing mindfulness, breathing exercises, meditation, focusing on yourself, and staying zen have become increasingly popular in recent years as exercises to help people cope with the stress and pressure of modern life.
You are left alone in a vast world that seems to be working against you.
So what can you do about it?
Breaking the Spell: Everything is Political
It starts by recognizing one simple, dangerous truth: you were never truly powerless.
Your disillusionment didn’t come from apathy, it came from betrayal. You were promised a voice but given a slogan. You were promised representation but handed a list of pre-chosen candidates. You were told that change comes through the system, only to discover that the system changes you far more than you change it.
But there’s a deeper reality hiding in plain sight:
Politics is not just about elections. It’s about who eats and who doesn’t, who works and who profits, who speaks and who is silenced.
It’s about how long your commute is, how much your medicine costs, what your children learn in school, and why some people live in fear while others live in gated peace.
When you look at it that way, you begin to see what they didn’t want you to see:
Even when you close your eyes to politics, politics doesn’t close its eyes to you.
From the food you buy, to the wages you earn, to the algorithm feeding you your next opinion — every part of your life is shaped by power. And power doesn’t disappear when you stop looking. It simply grows more invisible.
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