Hi friends, I’m Michelle from Opting Out, based in Brighton, UK. Here I share regular posts on slow living, rest, and opting out of burnout culture, plus my weekly Weekend Mood Board of what’s currently inspiring me. Paid subscribers also get access to our asynchronous Slow Reading Group (our next read starts at the end of December, and will be “The Restorative Rebel: Memoirs and Musings on Internalised Capitalism” by Dani Bicknell), yoga nidra audios and pre-recorded full-length restorative and yin yoga classes.
It’s my dream to create a community of misfits, questioners and resters. Are you in? ✨
For years, convenience has been sold to us as a kind of liberation: next-day shipping, infinite streaming, one-click everything. We live in a world where our desires can be met instantly, often before we’ve even noticed them. Algorithms anticipate our wants and funnel them back to us, keeping us consuming, scrolling, clicking and spending. Finding the pause point, slowing down, can feel almost impossible.
I’ve noticed something uncomfortable: the more convenient things become, the more disconnected I feel. Not just from the people behind what I’m consuming, but from myself: from my attention, my patience, my values. This culture of convenience trains us to expect immediacy, to prioritise speed, to treat everything we want as something we should have right now. With that, something subtle erodes: gratitude, relationship, depth, discernment. The power of delayed gratification is quietly vanishing.
To put it in perspective: there are now 2,781 billionaires worldwide whose combined wealth totals $14.2 trillion. Many of them are not using their wealth to reduce global poverty, but instead fund right-wing political campaigns, legal challenges that restrict the freedoms of marginalized people, or support ICE recruitment. Often, surface-level philanthropy serves primarily as a tax break.
Such extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer than three thousand people stands in stark contrast to the small, human-scale economies I long to be part of.
Lately, I’ve been slowly, imperfectly, opting out of the corporate default. Not because I expect perfection — I do still use Amazon sometimes (I navigate the same messy world as everyone else), but because I want to place my money, attention, and care in spaces that feel more alive, relational, and aligned.
I recently cancelled my Spotify account, after hearing many small-scale musicians speak about how poorly compensated they are on the platform. One folk singer explained that selling four vinyl albums at a gig earned as much as 20,000 Spotify streams. Spotify also promotes AI-generated music, while its founder invests in an AI military defense company and supports ICE recruitment. A new campaign group, Spotify Unwrapped, is calling for users to boycott the streaming giant. I now use Tidal, which musicians tell me pays fairly and does not promote AI-generated content.
But corporations like Amazon are harder to step away from when budgets are tight. Their low prices feed us while undercutting small independent businesses, keeping us loyal to the systems that profit from our economic precarity.
When I buy from a local business, I feel the threads of connection: a person receives my order, not an algorithm. Someone’s livelihood is supported, a craft continues, a community circulates its energy. There’s a reciprocity there that simply doesn’t exist in systems designed to extract as much “value” as quickly as possible.
Choosing small, local, independent spaces also shifts my own pace: slower, more intentional, less reactive. Opting out of the corporate giants becomes a way of opting back into my own nervous system, reclaiming the part of me that doesn’t want to be rushed, pressured, or swept along by perpetual urgency.
Opting out isn’t about taking the moral high ground. It’s about alignment. It’s about choosing the world we want to nourish — even in small, imperfect, everyday ways.
It’s about saying: I am not only here to consume and line the pockets of billionaires. I am a participant in a living, breathing community, and I want my choices to reflect that.
Even a small shift of attention away from corporations and the tiny fraction of people controlling so much of the planet’s wealth, creates more space for the things that sustain us: slowness, locality, craft, connection, reciprocity, enoughness.
And maybe, quietly, choosing small and local becomes a way of choosing ourselves.
Questions for Reflection
Where in your life do you default to convenience, and how does that affect your sense of connection, to yourself, to others, or to your community?
How does / would it feel to redirect a small portion of your spending from corporations to local or independent businesses?
When you consider the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and how they are spending it, what emotions or reflections arise in you?
How do small, intentional choices in your consumption align with the world you want to help create?
What would it mean for you to participate in a more human-scale economy in everyday life, even in ways that feel small or imperfect?