The Great Disengagement: When Clarity Becomes Unbearable
There’s a quiet exodus happening, and most people haven’t noticed yet.
Not a movement. Not a revolution. Not even a trend you can track on social media.
People are simply walking away.
From careers that demand they ignore what they know. From relationships built on comfortable fictions. From conversations that require them to pretend the emperor is wearing clothes.
They’re not making announcements. They’re not writing manifestos. They’re just… gone.
If you’ve felt this pull yourself, if you’ve found yourself unable to stomach one more meeting where everyone pretends the numbers aren’t cooked, one more dinner party where everyone performs enthusiasm for lives they privately hate, one more news cycle that asks you to be outraged on cue, then what I’m about to describe might bring you some relief.
This withdrawal isn’t pathology. It’s not antisocial behavior or depression or failure to adjust.
It’s what happens when you start seeing clearly in a world that runs on looking away.
The Moment Everything Changes
I’m not talking about reading a few articles about corporate corruption or watching a documentary about wealth inequality.
I’m talking about that moment when the pattern becomes undeniable. When you realize that the systems you’ve been participating in, the ones you’ve been told are meritocracies, democracies, fair markets, are actually elaborate mechanisms for extracting value from many and concentrating it in the hands of a few.
When you see that the culture war is theater designed to keep people fighting each other instead of looking up at who’s actually pulling the strings.
When you understand that most institutions aren’t broken, they’re working exactly as intended, just not for you.
When you’re still inside the illusion, everything makes sense. The explanations work. The narratives hold. You can read the news and feel informed. You can participate in political debates and feel engaged. You can pursue success and feel purposeful.
But once you see through it, once you really see the machinery beneath the marketing, you can’t go back.
You’re like someone who’s learned how a magic trick works. The magician can still perform it perfectly, but you’ll never experience the wonder again. You’ll only see the sleight of hand.
The Unbearable Cost of Participating
Here’s what nobody tells you about clarity: it’s expensive.
Once you see that your company’s “mission statement” is pure branding while the actual mission is maximizing shareholder value at any human cost, you can’t unhear that truth during the all-hands meeting.
Once you understand that both political parties serve the same donor class and simply offer different cultural aesthetics, you can’t get excited about elections the way you used to.
Once you recognize that social media is an attention-extraction machine designed to make you angry, envious, and distracted, you can’t scroll through it without feeling like you’re swimming in poison.
The problem isn’t that you’ve become cynical. The problem is that you’ve become aware.
And awareness has a price: you can no longer participate unconsciously.
Every conversation that requires you to pretend the obvious isn’t obvious feels like suffocation. Every social gathering where people perform their curated lives feels like theater of the absurd. Every meeting where everyone pretends to believe in something nobody actually believes feels like a slow death.
You start to realize that most of social life is a collective agreement to not mention what everyone can see. Like a giant game where the only rule is: don’t acknowledge we’re playing a game.
And you’re tired. So tired. Because maintaining the performance takes enormous energy.
You have to filter every thought before you speak. You have to translate your actual observations into socially acceptable language. You have to modulate your tone so you don’t sound “negative” or “difficult.” You have to pretend that your concerns about systemic issues can be addressed with individual solutions.
Eventually, something in you says: enough.
The Withdrawal
So you start to step back.
Not dramatically. Not with a big announcement. You just quietly start declining.
The networking events where everyone is a brand. The social gatherings where conversation never goes deeper than sports and weather and home renovation. The workplace initiatives that are obviously just PR exercises.
You stop posting on social media, not because you’re taking a “digital detox” but because you finally see it for what it is: a machine that turns human connection into data and sells your attention to the highest bidder.
You start letting relationships fade, not because you don’t care about people but because some friendships were built on a version of you that no longer exists, the version that could gossip about celebrities and complain about traffic and treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease.
You might even leave your career, which is often the hardest part. Because you’ve been told that your work is your identity, your worth, your contribution. But you can no longer pretend that what you’re doing matters when you can clearly see that it’s just moving money around, or creating problems to solve, or selling people things they don’t need.
And here’s what’s crucial to understand: this isn’t about being better than anyone else. This isn’t about enlightenment or superiority.
It’s about nervous system tolerance.
Your body, your psyche, your entire being can no longer handle the dissonance between what you see and what you’re asked to pretend you don’t see.
What Others Think Is Happening
When you withdraw, people notice. And they have theories.
They think you’re depressed. They think you’re going through a phase. They think you’ve become cynical or bitter or checked out.
They’ll say you’re being dramatic. They’ll tell you that “everyone knows” the system isn’t perfect but you still have to participate. They’ll accuse you of privilege, of being able to afford to care about these things.
They’re not entirely wrong about that last part. The ability to withdraw is, to some extent, a privilege. But staying is also a choice, and it’s one that you’ve decided you can no longer make.
What they don’t understand is that you’re not judging them. You’re not looking down on anyone who stays engaged. You’re simply acknowledging that for you, in this moment, participation has become impossible without betraying something fundamental in yourself.
The Hermit Phase Is Not the End
Here’s where the original spiritual framing actually got something right: there is often a period of withdrawal that’s necessary for integration.
When you step back from the noise, you finally have space to process what you’ve seen. To grieve what you’ve lost, and you have lost something. You’ve lost the comfort of the narrative. The ease of belonging. The simplicity of believing that working hard and playing by the rules leads somewhere meaningful.
In solitude, you can finally hear yourself think. You can figure out what you actually believe, not what you’ve been told to believe. You can distinguish between your authentic responses and your conditioned responses.
This isn’t escapism. It’s not running away. It’s the same thing an animal does when it’s wounded: it finds a quiet place to heal.
But, and this is crucial: The hermit phase is not the destination.
The point isn’t to disappear forever into a cabin in the woods, posting cynical takes about how everyone else is blind. That’s just another form of performance, another way of avoiding the harder work.
The point is to metabolize what you’ve seen. To integrate it. To figure out what, if anything, you want to do with this clarity.
The Return: Engagement Without Complicity
Some people who withdraw never come back. And that’s okay. We don’t all have to be activists or reformers or public intellectuals.
But many people do return, just differently.
They return with boundaries. They engage on their terms. They participate selectively, strategically, sustainably.
They might work in harm reduction, knowing they can’t fix the system but can ease suffering within it. They might create alternative structures, cooperatives, mutual aid networks, community projects that operate on different principles.
They might become teachers, therapists, artists, writers, people who work with individuals rather than trying to reform institutions they’ve come to see as fundamentally compromised.
Or they might just live their lives with integrity, making different choices, building different relationships, modeling a different way of being. Not preaching. Not evangelizing. Just existing as proof that another way is possible.
The key is this: they no longer need the system to be different in order to maintain their own sanity. They’ve found internal ground. They’ve stopped waiting for external validation of what they can see.
This is what makes them dangerous to power, actually. Not their rage or their rhetoric, but their lack of dependence on the very structures that demand compliance.
What About Changing Things?
I can hear the objection: “So we should all just withdraw? What about fighting for change? What about solidarity? What about responsibility?”
Fair questions.
Here’s my answer: you can’t give what you don’t have.
If you haven’t done your own work, f you haven’t integrated what you’ve seen, processed your own complicity, dealt with your own shadow, then your activism is likely just another form of performance. Another way of feeling righteous while avoiding your own depths.
The most effective agents of change are not the ones screaming the loudest or performing the most visible outrage. They’re the ones who have genuinely transformed themselves and now work steadily, often quietly, from a place of groundedness rather than reactivity.
Moreover, most people aren’t ready to see what you see. And that’s not a judgment, it’s an observation. People wake up to systemic issues on their own timeline, usually through direct experience of harm. Your job isn’t to force them to see. Your job is to see clearly yourself and then be available, without agenda, to those who are beginning to question.
Trying to convince people who aren’t ready often just entrenches their resistance. Worse, it can drain you of the energy you need to actually build alternatives.
For Those Who Are Pulling Away
If you’re in this space right now, if you’re finding it harder to show up for the performances, if you’re losing patience with the pretending, if you’re feeling the pull to step back, here’s what I want you to know:
Your discomfort is data. Your withdrawal might be wisdom.
You don’t have to stay engaged with things that drain you while producing no meaningful change. You don’t have to keep participating in systems that violate your values just because everyone else is.
You also don’t have to make it permanent or absolute. You can withdraw for a season. You can set boundaries. You can participate in some ways and not others.
What’s important is that you give yourself permission to trust what you see and feel what you feel, even when it isolates you from mainstream consensus.
Use whatever time you take away wisely. Not to marinate in bitterness or superiority, but to figure out what you actually care about and how you want to engage with it. To build your tolerance for discomfort so you can be present with difficulty without being consumed by it. To develop discernment about where your energy is well-spent.
Because the world doesn’t need more people performing outrage or virtue signaling their awareness. It needs people who have genuinely grappled with complexity and emerged with clarity, humility, and sustainable strategies for living differently.
The Pattern Continues
Throughout history, there have always been people who saw through the dominant narratives of their time. Who recognized that the emperor was naked, that the king was corrupt, that the system was rigged.
Some of them became prophets. Some became revolutionaries. Some became artists. Many simply became people who lived with more integrity in quieter ways.
The pattern is always the same: first you see, then you can’t unsee, then you have to decide what to do with what you’ve seen.
Withdrawal is often the middle phase. The space between seeing and acting. The cocoon where transformation happens.
So if you’re there right now, you’re not broken. You’re not failing. You’re not even alone, even though it might feel that way.
You’re in an ancient pattern, following a necessary path.
The caterpillar must dissolve before it becomes the butterfly. The seed must break in the darkness before it becomes the tree.
And the person who sees clearly must sometimes step away from collective illusions before they can figure out how to live authentically within an inauthentic world.
This isn’t the end of your engagement with the world.
It’s the beginning of a different kind of engagement, one rooted in reality rather than fantasy, in clarity rather than comfort, in authenticity rather than performance.
Take your time. Do your work. Trust the process.
And when you’re ready, if you’re ready, you’ll return with something genuine to offer: not more illusions, but the hard-won clarity of someone who has learned to see clearly and live accordingly.
That’s what the world actually needs.
Not more people playing the game.
But people who’ve remembered there are other ways to live.
What’s your experience been with this? Have you felt the pull to withdraw? What have you done with it? I’m curious about your stories.