The End of Waiting It Out

Why Resignation Feels So Tempting Right Now

A Saturday afternoon in Kentucky

I was recently at the Palace Theatre, listening to David Sedaris read from his new book. He did what he has always done — moving effortlessly between the absurd and the devastating, telling stories that make you laugh just long enough to realize what you’ve agreed to see. At one point, he talked about looking at the world now and worrying for the generation coming up inside this cacophony of technology, delegation, and division. Then he paused and offered another way to look at it. At some point, he said, we also start to feel at peace with not being part of it.

I didn’t hear that as irrelevance. I heard it as familiarity. Completion, maybe. Not resignation exactly, but the quiet recognition that you’ve been on the ride long enough to understand its mechanics. That stepping back doesn’t always mean giving up — it can also mean knowing when you’ve seen enough to name what’s happening.

I feel that way sometimes.

In my twenties, I felt what I think most people feel: that the future was pliable. That I could be part of shaping it. Sometimes that belief showed up in modest ways — hooking up the first AOL accounts at work, which felt at the time like progress with a capital P. Other times it lived in long conversations about how we would be different. Kinder. Fairer. More awake. We talked the way young people always do, as if the life ahead of us — and everyone else’s — was still mostly wet cement.

Those conversations mattered. They shaped what we leaned into and what we let pass. They carried an assumption that change was not only possible but likely. That when bad things happened, they could be corrected — not immediately, not cleanly, but eventually — because beneath it all, people shared some commitment to one another. To learning. To repair.

There’s no question that terrible things happened in my lifetime. The AIDS crisis was devastating — not only for the lives it took, but for how much of that suffering was compounded by ignorance and cruelty. How many vibrant, brilliant men finally finding their voices were lost. How much might have been different sooner with empathy and science. And yet, over time, those forces did intervene. Belatedly. Incompletely. But enough that I trusted the future to fix what the present could not.

The days after September 11 felt similar at first. A rupture so profound it briefly collapsed the distance between strangers. I remember the tears of newscasters. The relieved calls from friends — the first mass use case for cell phones, it turns out. First responders and volunteers came from everywhere. The planes were grounded. So they drove — across states and borders — because that’s what the moment demanded.

There were darker scenes, too — not just individual cruelty, but institutional shortcuts. Emergency powers stretched past their intent. Dissent recast as danger. Rules reworked in the name of urgency, then left that way. What felt temporary began to feel procedural. Still, I filtered much of that out. I told myself it was noise around a signal that still pointed toward collective reckoning.

Looking back, I’m not sure that was clarity so much as trust. Trust that the arc of history would always bend toward progress. Toward better. Toward repair.

What’s different now isn’t that the country suddenly lost its conscience. It’s that the systems we once relied on to slow our worst instincts no longer seem to hold. The distance between impulse and consequence has collapsed. What once took years now takes weeks. What once triggered debate now triggers applause. The arc didn’t disappear — it lost its tension.

For a long time, I mistook that tension for inevitability. I believed history bent because it always had. I didn’t fully appreciate how much human effort — legal, civic, cultural — it took to keep it under strain.

Every generation reaches a moment when the country they were raised to believe in no longer feels like it’s keeping its side of the bargain. For some it was Vietnam. For others, Watergate. AIDS. Iraq. The financial crisis. January 6. Or now — this prolonged erosion of trust that doesn’t arrive as a single rupture so much as a daily hum. People who did leave often discover they carried the unease with them anyway. It just changed accents.

What we’re reacting to isn’t only politics. It’s the fatigue of having to constantly verify reality. The loss of shared ground. The sense that institutions no longer absorb shock the way they once did. That the guardrails we thought were structural were, in fact, optional. Living this way is exhausting on a nervous-system level. Not because of any single headline, but because vigilance has become continuous. There’s no off-switch. No safe assumption that someone else is handling it. Anyone paying attention feels it — and many stop not because they don’t care, but because they’re depleted.

For a long time, I understood moments like this as breaks in the system — periods when something went wrong and needed to be corrected. That interpretation came with a quiet confidence: education would catch up, science would intervene, public sentiment would turn. History, I believed, had a self-healing mechanism.

What I’m realizing now is that this belief was doing more emotional labor than I noticed.

Because I no longer believe these are glitches in the system. I think they are the system.

That doesn’t mean they’re new. In fact, that may be the most unsettling part. The racism. The cruelty. The ease with which we abandon one another. These things have always been here. I remember my father saying that my whole life — every hopeful volley of this will get better met with some version of people have always been this way. I heard it then as cynicism. I hear it now as data.

I don’t know that either of us was fully right or wrong. But something changes as you get older. The same historical pivot points start to land differently — not because you care less, but because you stop assuming time itself is on your side. You begin to suspect that conditions don’t change people so much as reveal them. That progress isn’t the default setting. That decency doesn’t automatically crowd out its opposites.

This is not despair. It’s a recalibration.

It’s the moment when you realize you’ve been outsourcing hope to the future — and the future has quietly returned the contract. Not with malice. Just with a note that says: This part is yours now.

And here is the part that matters most: seeing the system clearly does not require accepting it.

There may come a time when the most honest response is preservation rather than resistance. Withdrawal rather than fight. But this is not that time.

This isn’t abstract. It isn’t theoretical. It isn’t happening somewhere else. It’s at the front door — in courts and classrooms and hospitals and city streets. And even if you weren’t sure before where the line was — what was too far — it’s being drawn for you now.

Alongside the cruelty, I see something else that doesn’t fit the story of inevitable collapse. I see friction reappearing. Judges insisting on process where power hoped for speed. States and cities testing the limits of federal overreach. Elections tightening where resignation was assumed. Ordinary people — not activists by identity — realizing that disengagement has quietly become a political act of its own.

Authoritarian systems don’t succeed because they’re persuasive. They succeed because they’re patient — and because people mistake fatigue for realism.

This moment only works if we treat it as foregone.

Authoritarianism doesn’t require universal belief; it requires widespread resignation. It succeeds not when everyone agrees, but when enough people decide the fight is no longer theirs. When responsibility is outsourced — again — to someone else, some later moment, some cleaner future.

Whatever exhaustion you’re carrying, set it down for a moment. Whatever hopelessness feels earned, set it aside. Not because it’s unjustified, but because it is precisely what this moment is counting on.

This is not someone else’s fight.

Hope doesn’t return here as a feeling. It comes back as a decision. As participation. As refusal. As momentum. As the collective insistence that even if the system reveals something uncomfortable about who we are, it does not get the final word on what we do.

The future may no longer be something we can trust blindly. But it is still something we can fight for — with open eyes, without mythology, and with the clear understanding that nothing about this is guaranteed.

That isn’t naïve. It’s necessary.