Stepping back: From apathy to action
How behavioural science is in danger of ignoring one of the biggest themes of our times
There are many ways that theorists have attempted to characterise the age in which we live – the act itself is perhaps an impossible task, but also surely a necessary one. We need ‘informed speculation’ to help us reflect on the more nuanced aspects of our lives, crystallising what we vaguely understand and allowing us to respond in a meaningful manner.
Many of the themes that are identified in this process are often related to what we do, from looksmaxxing and “wisdom flexing” to hustle culture to self-optimisation. Arguably, all of these relate to life as a process of continuous activity.
But if we look more carefully, we can also see the inverse of this quietly gaining ground, that of ‘stepping back’ or withdrawal. For example, there has been much debate about ‘man-keeping’, the expectation that women absorb the emotional labour required to sustain men, such as managing moods, providing reassurance, and maintaining relational stability. This has famously spawned the 4B movement in South Korea, with women refusing marriage, childbirth, dating, and heterosexual sex. In Western contexts, the closest equivalent is perhaps the rise of ‘boy sober’, in other words, stepping back from app-based dating and dominant heterosexual relationship scripts.
Other forms of stepping back cover the workplace with memes such as “Act your wage” and “bare minimum Monday,” positioning withdrawal from the notion of work as something to be identified with, recasting it as a bounded, transactional activity. The “Touch grass” movement pushes against continuous digital engagement with commencement speakers in US university campuses being booed if they give a boosterish speech about AI. Decline in voting turnout in political elections can be seen less as apathy and perhaps more as a form of anti-politics, reframing formal electoral institutions as something to disengage from rather than reform. Stepping back, it seems, is in vogue.
But because these phenomena span a range of topics, they are hard to see, as they are often treated in isolation and explained through the specific agendas of gender, labour markets, technology, or trust. And yet they all have in common the stepping back from systems that depend for their very existence on continuous enactment.
Stepping back is not often given focus, perhaps because it is seen as passive, a sign of apathy – we are more interested in action and tangible behaviours, so this is a non-story in some ways. While participation may need to be encouraged, nudged, or contested, we are expected to engage and act, whether this is to work, to vote, to date, to engage, or to adopt. But what about stepping back? We shall see how this may, in fact, represent a more active and significant form of behaviour in itself, and we need to give this the same attention that we would pay more familiar forms of action.
A brief history of stepping back
Historical examples perhaps allow us to understand some of today’s dynamics of stepping back more clearly. A very early example can be found in the Roman Empire, where early Christians refused to participate in civic rituals such as emperor worship and public sacrifice, practices that were critical to maintaining the authority of the Roman state. Some historians suggest that whilst this stepping back did not dismantle the system immediately, it did, nevertheless, disrupt and challenge the practices through which that authority was maintained.
A couple of centuries later, another dominant system was challenged. The Protestant Reformation similarly involved a stepping back from taking part in Catholic systems, as reformers refused to make indulgence payments, financial contributions made in exchange for the remission of sins and no longer recognised sacramental mediation, where priests acted as intermediaries between individuals and God. By doing this, historians have again shown how this weakened the Church’s grip on society.
Both of these cases illustrate philosopher Hannah Arendt’s point that power is not something institutions simply possess; in fact, power is something that requires the ongoing participation of the population (albeit in systems that rely on legitimacy rather than coercion). This means that whilst stepping back does not entail direct confrontation or overthrow, it does show in a very stark way how institutions rely on ongoing participation at the very least for their legitimacy.
Perhaps then, little wonder that the act of stepping back has rarely been encouraged, and instead has been limited by being formalised and carefully contained. For example, religious orders such as monks and nuns have long offered selective forms of stepping back. Monks and nuns stepped back from family life, individual economic activity, and civic engagement, as well as from the everyday rhythms that structured social life. But monastic communities also owned land, provided education and care, making them socially adjacent rather than fully separate. This is less an exit from society than a very specific form of withdrawal. Participation was not eliminated, but reshaped in a way that was acceptable.
A more extreme example of this is the anchorite, where figures (often but not exclusively women) were enclosed in small cells, often following a symbolic funeral rite that marked their departure from ordinary social life. In this sense, stepping back involved a clearly signalled break from the world, but even here, the anchorite was not fully outside society. Rather, it was physically positioned at the edge of society, often attached to a church, which meant that they were still socially embedded and were consulted for advice, often recognised as figures of prayer and reflection within their communities.
This position of being both stepped back whilst still embedded seems important, as the act of stepping back from the routines of family, work, and society means these behaviours could be seen as something that is a matter of choice rather than something that is inevitable. Stepping back then is not always simply the removal of the individual from the wider system, but it does seem to reveal the system’s dependence on being continually engaged with.
A more recent example from the twentieth century is conscientious objection, where refusing to participate in war meant stepping back from one of the state’s most fundamental principles, that of its sovereignty, but at the same time does not directly challenge its existence. And the countercultural movements of the 1960s also involved forms of withdrawal from work, consumption, and institutional life, as people sought to step outside the routines of mainstream society. More recently, campaigns have encouraged people to ‘Resist and Unsubscribe’ from digital services.
In all these cases, the systems themselves persisted, but perhaps their role is for wider society to approach them in a more questioning manner, challenging the notion that they are inevitable.
Behavioural science and the assumption of activation
So what role has behavioural science had to play? It’s perhaps reasonable to suggest that it has tended to side with ‘engagement’; how behaviour is produced, whether through ‘nudges’ or creating defaults that encourage action. The unwritten focus is on creating an account of how we come to act in the particular ways that we do. For example, low uptake of preventive healthcare is often explained in terms of some kind of deficit that can be remedied, whether through, for example, present bias (focusing on what feels good now rather than what matters later) or a lack of salience (where the behaviour doesn’t feel important or noticeable enough to act on).
The underlying assumption is that people should and in fact can act to make more effective long-term decisions, which means the task is to design interventions that encourage this behaviour. But what is less often considered is that people may not be acting, not because they need the right nudge or incentive, but because they are stepping back from systems they do not fully accept or want to engage with.
So in a subtle way, enacting a behaviour is considered to be the assumed mode, whilst ‘non-behaviour’ is seen as a deviation to be somehow remedied, and not simply a phenomenon in its own right.
The difficulty is that behavioural science has relatively little language for this. Non-action is treated as absence rather than outcome, a failure rather than something to be interpreted as important in its own right.
The risks of participation
But there are perfectly good reasons why we may not choose to participate, as it is not risk-free. Because while we might expect and hope that our participation would be listened to, reflected and acted on, of course, we know that in many systems, attempts to question or challenge can easily be minimised or ignored. Our concerns can be treated as simple misunderstandings, our experiences discounted as unfortunate exceptions, and our critique is seen as irrelevant. If we experience this, we might not unreasonably consider that, if we are not getting a meaningful response, why should we continue to participate?
And we can see this across multiple contexts. Employees raising concerns about workload or organisational culture can find these reframed as issues of personal resilience or a problematic attitude - rather than engaging with structural conditions. Users challenging digital platforms around data use or content moderation have complained they encounter opaque processes or generic responses that listen to the critique but do not offer meaningful change. Patients reporting side effects or questioning treatment pathways can find their experiences dismissed or reinterpreted through clinical frameworks that leave little room for their own experience.
Under these conditions, stepping back is understandable, reflecting that engagement is costly, extractive, or unlikely to be meaningfully received. But there is something perhaps more significant also at play – the way in which our participation may maintain something that we fundamentally disagree with.
Participation as reproduction
Institutions rely on engagement and compliance both to function and to maintain their authority. Hence, markets rely on people buying things not only to generate revenue, but to sustain wider political ambitions of economic growth. Digital platforms rely on people continuing to use them to demonstrate their relevance and value. And so on. In each case, participation is not simply an outcome but is something that makes up these systems and is central to their continued existence.
Of course, much has been noted about the challenge of loneliness and the importance of ongoing engagement by people with each other. But this is not uniformly considered to be the case with some, such as Anthony Storr, considering that stepping back from each other, or solitude, can be a perfectly functional mode of being. Indeed, some psychoanalysts, such as Donald Winnicott, consider the ‘capacity to be alone’ as a developmental achievement, the ability to exist without the continuous reinforcement of others.
This suggests that, unlike many systems, people possess the capacity to step back, to disengage without collapsing. And we are not only capable of being alone in relation to others, but we are also increasingly capable of being non-participatory in relation to systems.
This is, of course, not always easy. We learn how to engage from an early age, internalising expectations about how we should participate within the systems we inhabit. For example, this may mean we need to understand that we need to respond to workplace feedback in ways that signal our personal resilience, and we avoid critiquing the wider structural setup - we navigate healthcare in ways that fit the established conditions our doctors have in mind, so they can connect this with a well-defined set of treatments. In this sense, participation is not simply about taking part, but about doing so ‘correctly’.
As such, institutions define what counts as legitimate participation, and we come to internalise these expectations, shaping our behaviour accordingly. Being a good participant, then, involves more than compliance, requiring a degree of internalised self-regulation, where we align our actions and words with the logic of the system.
Perhaps this helps explain why stepping back can feel difficult and significant. To step away is not simply to stop participating, but to step outside a wide range of expectations we have about ourselves and others.
Destituent power
One person who has explored the notion of stepping back is philosopher Giorgio Agamben and his concept of destituent power. Agamben is a controversial figure, particularly following his response to COVID restrictions, where he argued that emergency measures risked becoming normalised. But perhaps this controversy reflects the challenging nature of withdrawal that he has given so much focus in his work.
Drawing on his work, Pepita Hesselberth and Joost de Bloois suggest that stepping back is not to do with absence (in their case, political), but a rethinking of what counts as political action. They suggest that the dominant model of politics assumes participation in terms of debate, conflict, and creating policy interventions. On this basis, power is either exercised through building something new or by contesting what already exists; in either case, the political system remains as the central place of action.
Agamben’s ‘destituent power’, by contrast, does not aim to change or challenge the system, but instead, it operates by stepping away from the practices through which the system is maintained. Its significance, therefore, lies not in what it looks like, but in what it does: it withdraws the behaviours that sustain a system, without needing to oppose it directly.
It may not be driven by anger or confrontation (which could result in an oppositional action), but instead may be something that is the result of weariness, a gradual exhaustion with the demands of participation. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests, stepping back is not driven primarily by opposition, but by the forms of fatigue produced in a society that demands continuous activity and self-optimisation. This means that destituent power is not about dramatic change or overthrow but more about a suspension, which then simply makes existing systems less enactable.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, this is not simply an individual act of isolation, but the act of stepping back creates different forms of relating to others. Hesselberth and Blooiscan suggest that this can be seen in the way that when people step back from formal institutions they create new ways of being socially connected: for example, opting out of traditional employment structures can mean people develop new, informal networks of collaboration such as freelance collectives or project-based communities; disengaging from mainstream dating norms while forming alternative communities of care such as chosen families and online support groups; reducing participation in digital platforms while cultivating smaller, more bounded forms of interaction such as private messaging groups or more local face-to-face networks. Stepping back, in this sense, is not about fleeing from others, but can be a reorganisation of how and where connection takes place.
Stepping back as explanation
Returning to the field of behavioural science, it might be tempting to draw upon the notion of ‘psychological reactance’, where people push back against perceived constraints. But this still assumes that resistance takes the form of opposition, rather than stepping back.
Taking a ‘stepping back’ lens allows us to see a range of issues in a different light. Take misinformation, for example, where arguably much of the behavioural science response has focused on correcting false beliefs, improving media literacy, or strengthening trust in reliable sources. Whilst commendable, these approaches still assume that individuals remain engaged within the informational system when a ‘stepping back’ perspective suggests people holding these beliefs may not simply be misinformed, but are instead removing themselves from systems of information they do not fully trust or feel represented by. Disengagement from mainstream media, scepticism toward official sources, or reliance on alternative networks is then not simply belief-based errors, but a withdrawal from participation in particular informational systems.
This means that the challenge is not only to correct beliefs, but to understand why individuals are disengaging from the institutions through which those beliefs are meant to be shaped.
Conclusion: the instability of participation
Perhaps what stepping back points to is a broader shift in how society is organised, which has long depended on the assumption that participation will continue. Behavioural science has largely taken participation as a given, focusing on how behaviour can be shaped, encouraged, or optimised within systems that are assumed to remain intact.
But what we are now beginning to see is a weakening of that assumption. Participation is increasingly conditional or withheld altogether. As we have explored, this does not take the form of coordinated resistance or opposition but as a weakening of engagement across multiple domains. This is not only hard to spot but remains under-researched or theorised.
So where does this take us? Hesselberth & de Bloois suggest that what emerges is less a society defined by resistance, and more one where participation can no longer be assumed. But surely the bigger point is not simply in what the withdrawal reduces, but in what it makes possible.
As Agamben sets out, stepping back is not only a retreat from dominant systems, but an opportunity for a rethink and reorientation about what alternatives lie outside them. On this basis, stepping back does not seek to simply replace one structure with another, but to suspend the basis on which participation has been organised.
Participation, then, is no longer the only way of being in the world, and as it becomes less certain, it is only then that other possibilities begin to come into view.