I did not know I was a rule breaker by nature until I went to college. I grew up homeschooled and evangelical, contexts which did fuck me up but not in all the common ways. One of the ways that I had a quite abnormal experience is that I grew up in a house where all the rules made sense. My parents—to their eternal credit—treated me and my siblings as intelligent humans from the day we were born, and because of that, always worked to help us understand the rules that governed household life. Because of this, I grew up generally able to make sense of the logic of my home and world. My parents also did not create onerous rules based on beliefs of How The World Should Be or How Children Should Act, instead choosing to make rules that acknowledged our agency and desire to gain independence. In the house I grew up in, things made sense, and the rules were logically defensible and felt overall reasonable to live with, which meant my rebellious side wasn’t really developed.

After graduating high school, I worked full time for two years before electing to attend college. I enrolled in a very fundamentalist Christian college at age 20, after having a lot of freedom and agency over my life for the past 2 years. The thing about fundamentalist Christian colleges is they very much believe that college students are children, and children cannot be trusted with freedom or agency. Which is how I got a crash course in a different world from the one I grew up in, one where prioritizing agency and freedom are not the goals for most rules. The rules instead exist to control and reduce freedom. Suddenly I was in horribly oppressive environment, by my own choice.

I fucking hated it.

That is the point in my memory when I began practicing one of the most useful skills I possess today: refusal.

Refusal has been on my mind lately because this fucking country just re-elected a narcissist who campaigned on the simple platform of: let me be the genocidal dictator I failed to become last time. Which seems to me is a pretty clear sign that a bunch of bad shit is going to happen in the next 4 years (or more!).

It’s going to be worse than last time because we gave them the practice round! Now they are better at propaganda. They are better at navigating the legal system. They’ve worked on their messaging. They’ve identified trans people and immigrants of color as the othered enemies. But it’s also going to be worse because we’re all tired. We’re fucking exhausted, this is the 8th year of this bullshit, and the country just ensured at least 4 more. We are numb with burnout, and that means they won’t face as vocal of a resistance. They have bigger ambitions while facing less friction. The signs are not positive.

So if this is the world we’re living in, it’s my belief that all of us need to start improving our abilities to refuse. To say no. To create friction foremost, and also to create space for new possibilities.

I believe this because I know that when you practice refusal, you start conjuring up space for different futures. It’s a magic trick. When you refuse to do a thing that the majority of other people are doing, you create space for others to join you. When you refuse to enforce a dumb rule, you make the world malleable. When you refuse to believe a story without doing your own research, you build trust in yourself. When you refuse to take people at their word—when you understand that trust has to be earned it is not just given by default—you undermine power. The effects of the practice of refusal is to create a less predictable world, which makes planning harder. Right now, the people taking power are making a bunch of plans that they hope to implement, and because they had a practice round, they believe they know what the barriers to implementation will be.

To practice refusal is to always be open to different worlds. To embrace the possibility of change, to stay open to curiosity, to do so many things that nourish the parts of yourself you need to tap into for this future we have in front of us. The practice of refusal can take so many forms. The fun of it is you can determine for yourself what shape your refusal will take.

For me, I have never met a rule I’m not willing to test. Test doesn’t necessarily mean break, but it isn’t exclusive of it. The first test is always is to ask for more context on the rule, such as the consequences for breaking the rule. After that, there’s lots of other tests. The goal of all of these tests is to figure out how much of the rule matters. What can I refuse?

Sometimes you can refuse simply with a hard no. I love this option. The world is filled with choices, and because of the way we’ve structured the world, there’s often a lot of people incentivized to get you to say yes. Buy this thing, use this new product, AI is the future, crypto is useful, so on and so forth. Resistance is futile, many say, and it’s true you cannot reform the system from within the system. But you can intentionally choose to refuse certain parts of the system.

AI is a relevant example for me; you can go look to see all the books I’ve read on data and AI and such. I’m not ignorant about the tools. But so far I have refused to use any of them. I don’t use ChatGPT, I actually don’t even know where to go to use it. I have never generated an image with those tools. I have refused to use any of the modern AI products, simply because I can. I have a lot of reasons and arguments, yes, but those are about the system; why I don’t think the tech industry should be allowed to build in the ways it is, to destroy the climate in the way it is, etc etc. I think those arguments are reasonable, but they do not inform my refusal. Mostly, I just don’t use these tools because I haven’t yet hit a point where anything I could use them for seems better than my existing workflows.

But for you, I don’t care if you use AI tools or not. That is not the point. The point of developing your muscle of refusal is that it teaches you about possibility and agency. Even if you don’t choose the refusal as a hard no option, there are myriad ways to refuse and push back.

You can refuse to do things on others timetables. Sometimes this is a dumb decision; if you are in danger and you refuse to act with urgency, you will fuck around and find out. Sometimes, though, it’s a brilliant decision. If someone is asking you to do a thing on a specific timetable, that is most likely because their goals are dependent on that timetable. If you think their goals are bad, or not important, or just not worthy of harming yourself, you can drag your fucking feet. Move slow. Push back on timetables. Keep asking for more time. These are all options when you are the one defining the timetable, and by pushing back and fighting for timetables you think are reasonable, you are fighting for your needs and reducing the assumed power of the other person (for more on this, read up on malicious compliance).

You can also refuse to accept the expectations of others. This is a wildly powerful form of refusal that mostly is only exercised by assholes, which does give it a bad name. The harmful form of this is refusing to meet reasonable expectations; cleaning up after yourself, or considering others emotions, or you know, just being a kind and empathetic person generally speaking. That’s a real good way to be an asshole, and if you do it to people who you need on your side, well, you reap what you sow jackass. BUT, there are a lot of people these days who are not on our sides. Not just in power, but who actively are cheering on this administration. And if they expect to live in a civilized society, well, they are very much trying to have their cake (which, in my imagination is a cake that says FUCK EVERYONE THAT’S NOT LIKE ME in big red MAGA colors) and eat it too. Which is to say, the people in power and the people who have gleefully elected those people into power want to enjoy the fruits of the world that exists while also destroying everything that led to its creation.

We can refuse their desires. Do you remember when a small family restaurant refused to serve a Republican leader during the last administration? It was a HUGE controversy because it punctured the myth of civility. Republicans truly believe themselves to be the good guys, doing the lords work. And to have to face the indignity of getting thrown out of restaurants and refused service, well, who on earth would be so villainous.

I am arguing that this controversy should become commonplace. Republicans have power and are planning to use it to harm a bunch of people. They are going to expect everyone around them to buy into their belief system. They want to be the good people, and they will absolutely freak the fuck out if they are unable to hold that belief.

You have agency and freedom to a far greater degree than maybe you realize. You may not have power; none of us alone do. We may not succeed at harm removal during the next four years, but every day has to include active practices of harm mitigation. Practicing refusal, in myriad forms, helps you continually center the freedom and agency you have. You are subject to systems and institutions far more powerful than you, but they are not all-powerful. You can work to find or create the cracks, and you can work to find the others who are also finding or creating cracks. If we all start practicing this work of refusal, of identifying the systems and expectations and rules that don’t make sense, aren’t serving needs, or are actively harm, and then pushing back on them, in small and large ways, we can all start learning what else is possible.

We can create new worlds together, simply by learning that this current world is not the only possibility. By practicing refusal, we take ownership of our actions and stop mindlessly perpetuating a world that is actively harmful. That seems pretty great.

As a post-script, here’s a very random, very flow-of-consciousness list of ideas for refusal that you could start practicing.

• Refuse to tip the minimum, because you know that an extra $5 can really make someone’s day.
• Refuse to chide a coworker or report for a minor transgression of the rules, because you can see it was harmless.
• Refuse to use a goddamn leafblower to have a neat lawn, and instead prioritize the wellbeing of the critters around you (there are 3 leafblowers across the street from me right now, informing this point)
• Refuse to use your normal coping mechanism for some stress, and see if you can find a new option
• Refuse to drive when you can walk, as an experiment
• Refuse to expect perfection of yourself or someone else, and instead set your expectations based on the needs of the context
• Refuse to agree with someone who says an asshole thing, and instead ask them to explain it more
• Refuse to laugh when others are the butt of the joke
• Refuse to demand eye-for-an-eye when you have been wronged and instead center the other person
• Refuse to center the other person when they have legitimately harmed you, and instead center your own needs
• Refuse to treat things as black and white when you see nuance
• Refuse to let others introduce nuance when a simple solution is available
• Refuse to believe the lies others say about people you don’t know
• Refuse to trust people who have not earned your trust

I could keep going. My point with some of these is that refusal is not a rulebook, it is a question. It is to recognize that the future is not guaranteed, and maybe it’s worth trying something new in a situation to see what happens. Maybe, just maybe, you can help something better emerge.