It begins, predictably, with a disaffection. Not the sharp, sudden severing of a youthful rebellion – that’s a performance, a carefully curated narrative of righteous indignation. No, this is something deeper, more insidious. It’s the slow, relentless erosion of conviction, the quiet acceptance of the world as it *is*, not as it *should be*. It's the forgetting of the ache, the simmering dissatisfaction that fueled initial fervor.
We call it “undiggressiveness,” a term I stumbled upon in the margins of a forgotten archive – a collection of notes and sketches belonging to Elias Thorne, a cartographer obsessed with charting not landscapes, but emotional strata. Thorne believed that every individual carried within them an ‘unmapped territory’ - a core of resistance against normalization, a stubborn refusal to fully integrate into the prevailing currents of thought and feeling.
The first sign is often the subtle shift in language. The passionate declarations give way to carefully calibrated phrases, designed to avoid friction. Words like “interesting,” “perhaps,” “I’m not sure…” become staples. It’s a linguistic shield, erected against any possibility of challenge. The vocabulary of engagement—‘advocate,’ ‘demand,’ ‘fight’—withdrawn, replaced with the bland comfort of observation.
Consider the artist, initially driven by a desperate need to expose injustice through visceral imagery, eventually producing landscapes rendered in muted tones, technically perfect but utterly devoid of emotional charge. Or the activist, whose initial speeches ignited movements, now content to write polite letters to corporations and attend sparsely attended town hall meetings.
Undiggressiveness isn’t merely a passive acceptance; it's an active *creation*. It requires a constant, almost unconscious, effort to dilute the edges of one’s convictions. It’s the art of becoming less… passionate. There is a terrifying beauty in this process, a kind of elegant self-erasure.
“The greatest act of rebellion,” Thorne wrote, “is not to shout against the darkness, but to become accustomed to it.”
Perhaps the true horror lies not in the eventual surrender, but in the *belief* that we are resisting. We cling to labels – ‘critical thinker,’ ‘social justice warrior’ – as flimsy shields against the inevitable tide of indifference.