“Not everything is political” is one of those phrases that is usually said with a sigh.

It’s a boundary. A plea. It’s the line you reach for when the group chat turns into a referendum, when the family dinner threatens to become a debate club, when someone insists your choice of coffee brand, gym, or streaming subscription is a moral position. And in fairness, it often comes from somewhere understandable: exhaustion. People are tired of being recruited into arguments at dinner tables, in group chats, in the queue for coffee. They’re tired of feeling like every conversation is a loyalty test. They’re tired of being told that if they don’t have the “right” take, they’re complicit in something.

But the phrase also carries a quiet contradiction in that it’s usually said at precisely the moment when something is political, just not in a way that feels flattering, convenient, or easy to act on.

It doesn’t just shut down arguments; it narrows the definition of politics until it means only party leaders, elections, Parliament, “the news.” It turns politics into a distant theatre, something happening somewhere else, performed by people with suits, microphones, and security details. And once politics becomes a remote spectacle, apathy stops looking like a problem and starts looking like a reasonable response.

But political apathy rarely begins with laziness. It begins with fatigue. If politics reaches you mostly as crisis alerts and scandal loops, it’s hard to build the patient belief that your attention matters. If every election is framed as “the most important of our lives” and yet everyday life still feels harder then the promise that participation leads to improvement starts to feel like a trick. Apathy can be a form of disappointment: a protective shrug that says, “I cared before, and it didn’t change anything.”

That’s where “not everything is political” becomes tempting. It offers relief from the performance. It lets you opt out of a conversation that often feels rigged, one that’s too loud to think in and too cynical to hope in. But opting out doesn’t pause the decisions being made; it only changes who gets to make them without friction.

Because politics, in the most basic sense, is about power. Who has it, how it’s used, and who pays the cost. You can avoid political content and discussions, but you can’t avoid living inside systems shaped by political choices. The price of your bus ticket is political. The hours your employer schedules you for are political. Whether your landlord can raise the rent with little warning is political. The quality of the air you breathe, the safety of the water you drink, the funding of the school down the road, the design of the street you cross. These aren’t abstract debates; they’re the architecture of ordinary life.

Even the things that feel “personal” often sit on top of public decisions. If you feel anxious about money, that’s not only about budgeting; it’s about wages, tuition costs, maintenance loans, rent inflation, interest rates, the cost of your groceries. All decisions made collectively and managed politically. When people say “keep politics out of it,” they’re often asking to keep power out of sight, as if naming the forces shaping your life is itself the problem.

Of course, it’s true that not every conversation needs to become an argument, and not every preference is a manifesto. There’s a difference between recognising political context and treating every interaction like a purity test. The point isn’t to turn friendship into ideology, or to make your hobbies into battlegrounds. The point is to notice that politics doesn’t enter your life only when you invite it. It’s already there, in the background, deciding what’s affordable, what’s possible, what’s protected, what’s neglected.

Apathy thrives when politics feels like a choice between two bad options, or a game whose rules you didn’t write and can’t change. It grows when people suspect that participation is symbolic: a sticker, a ballot, a brief ritual that absolves the system without transforming it. But apathy has consequences that are anything but symbolic. It concentrates influence in the hands of those who never skip an election, never miss a meeting, never doubt that the system will listen to them. It leaves decisions to the most organised, the most resourced, or simply the most stubborn.

There’s an irony here. The more politics is framed as something separate from real life, the more real life becomes shaped by politics without scrutiny. You don’t have to be passionate about policy to be affected by it. You don’t have to enjoy debates to be governed by their outcomes. You can insist you’re “not political” and still be living inside someone else’s politics, someone else’s idea of what you deserve, what you can access, what you should tolerate.

Apathy is understandable, but it’s not neutral. It’s a decision to let the world keep deciding itself around you. And if everyday life is where you feel the pinch, in your rent, your student loan balance, or the wait for a GP appointment, then politics is already there, shaping it all whether or not you’re in the mood for it.

Image by Corey Young via Unsplash