Personal acts of resistance when it feels like the world is ending. War, tyranny, rapid social change, alienation, -phobias and -isms. When world events feel overwhelming and chaotic, it’s easy to feel like you are powerless. However, individual acts of resistance add up. They can create significant positive change, not only for ourselves but for those around us.
Understandable overwhelm
The digital age is constant information overload – the perpetual flow of urgent demands for attention now has a well documented impact on our mental wellbeing.
2025 seems to have brought even more stressors. News reports of real world events are hard to distinguish from satirical dystopian comedy skits. Weather forecasts bring record-breaking statistics that seem to foreshadow Armageddon. Every day it seems fire, fighting, flood, famine, financial ruin, fear or fascism land on the doorsteps of someone you know or care about. It’s no wonder many of us are experiencing overwhelm and feeling helpless.
The current epidemic of anxiety, depression and auto-immune or chronic fatigue conditions is no coincidence in the fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. My own malaise is compounded by a strong desire to do something to make the world fairer, kinder, safer and more comfortable, for everyone, and I know I’m not alone in that.
Changing the world
Unless you are one of a handful of extremely wealthy and powerful individuals, you can’t make an impact on the big stuff – war, genocide, climate change, the global economy, gender-based violence, or mass extinction, for example. These harms and horrors are systemic – shaped and enacted at a social, cultural political level.
We’ve shaped our own doomsday collectively, over generations and woven across interconnected global systems. And whilst not one of us sought or chose this, we’ve each been part of allowing the shift to happen. Our individual consent is implied by our assumptions and expectations of ourselves and each other – what we have come to believe we can or can’t do.
When it comes to taking action for change, the first hurdle is isolation. As just one person, taking action feels like a huge effort that will achieve little. Although digital technology has made humankind more connected than ever, it’s also left many of us feeling alone in a polarised echo chamber, too paralysed by despair to act.
Personal rebellion
Resisting overwhelm and challenging standard cultural assumptions and expectations is an act of personal rebellion. As Audre Lorde – Black, civil rights activist, writer, lesbian and feminist, diagnosed with a second bout of cancer in 1988 wrote: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Her statement is inseparable from the context and the time. Lorde’s very existence, openly inhabiting identities that (still) face systemic and personal harm, can clearly be seen as an act of resistance. Whereas a radical, political act of rebellion for a white, financially comfortable, standard-sized and able-bodied, straight cis business woman is probably not a self-care spa day.
An act of personal rebellion for her might look like:
- no make-up and comfortable clothes when she’s expected to ‘dress up’;
- calling out a friend for misgendering someone;
- shopping locally to promote ethical, sustainable businesses;
- or refusing to take part in a panel discussion with an all-white speaker line-up.
These acts are tiny yet mighty, because they raise a question, for her and for anyone bearing witness. The context makes them acts of dissent, or explicit nonconsent: purposeful, visible resistance to mainstream standards.
Challenging entitlement culture
The systems we live in are not consent-based – they are cultures of entitlement. The most powerful few have a huge sense of entitlement. The rest find our choices limited by circumstance. We weigh up our position, status and role in society based on identities and assumptions about what ‘someone like me’ is entitled to do. Most of the time, with little thought, we comply and conform. In this way, entitlement culture shapes what we allow ourselves permission to do.
We cannot change a system or culture without questioning these assumptions and expectations. Activating our consent means challenging our implied tolerance of everyday injustices. This is not a swift and violent revolution – it’s a paradigm shift towards consent culture and community. My working definition of consent, here, is “Using our agency to make connection, where all those involved or impacted are secure and comfortable enough to continue”.
Choosing not to wear make up might sound trivial, but defying convention isn’t always easy. Human beings are social animals – we require connection to thrive. Those who question, challenge or refuse to act ‘normal’ can find we are judged, shamed and excluded. Social exclusion (and fear of it) is psychologically painful and can be physically risky.
In practice
I invited a coaching client to explore how his personal rebellion might resist the ‘bro-culture’ in his workplace. He feared that ‘coming out’ as bisexual could threaten his job, his livelihood and put him at risk of violence. He decided that talking openly about mental health was a meaningful first step and an acceptable personal risk. His actions could enable others to question, open up possibilities and move toward open acceptance of his sexuality.
A fellow consent activist told me that her high-risk hands-on work providing frontline first-aid at protest rallies had become too demanding, physically and emotionally. She stopped and also stepped away from social media keyboard wars. She set new boundaries, consciously picking her battles where she could make the most meaningful impact now: publishing her writing more widely and community fund-raising.
She offered me a question: ‘To what end?’
This is a simple yet powerful invitation to pause and consider what purpose is served by your actions. It’s a call to recognise and step away from overwhelm, before it becomes despair; to question and challenge entitled assumptions and open up possibilities; to resist conforming and compliance and harness your consent to make change in your own tiny yet mighty way.
