Game Over, Man?

Dropping Out of the Dropship

Private Hudson doesn't panic because he's a coward. He panics because he's the only one who's done the math. The dropship's crashed, the mission brief was fiction, and command is still insisting everything's going according to plan. His famous outburst isn't surrender—it's accurate threat assessment delivered at volume because nobody else will say it.

I've been thinking about Hudson lately. Not the meme version, but the actual moment: when do competent people look around, calculate the gap between stated mission and actual conditions, and decide they're done?

It's not one thing. It's the accumulation of small dissonances that eventually exceeds your capacity to absorb them. For me, the specific catalyst was mundane: reading test scores. Portland Public Schools celebrating academic recovery while their Black students scored at half the proficiency rate of Black students in suburban districts. The institution took a victory lap using white student achievement to mask catastrophic failure for the students they claimed to center in their equity work.

I'd been a precinct committee person with the Multnomah Democrats. I'd shown up, done some of the work, believed the story about incremental progress and institutional improvement. But watching an institution perform progressive values while producing regressive outcomes—and then celebrate itself for it—something cracked. Not my values. My capacity to keep pretending the gap didn't exist.

The decision to resign wasn't ideological evolution. It was energy economics. The cost of continuing to participate—showing up to meetings, making calls, maintaining belief that this institution could deliver what it claimed—exceeded what I could sustain. Especially eighteen months after finding our dog unresponsive one afternoon, learning she had a month to live, and discovering that grief doesn't just make you sad. It reorganizes your tolerance for institutional performance.

Loss depletes reserves you didn't know you were drawing on. Things you could previously absorb—contradictions, performances, gaps between rhetoric and reality—become intolerable. Not because they got worse, but because you don't have the buffer anymore. The cognitive dissonance that used to feel like productive tension just feels like noise.

So I stepped back. Changed my voter registration to "unaffiliated." Stopped attending meetings. Started writing essays trying to make sense of what just happened. Was it fatigue? Impotence? Insignificance? Or just recognizing that I didn't have access to any levers that could close the gap between what the institution claimed and what it delivered?

Here's what I've learned about walking away: it's enabled by privilege and driven by depletion. I could resign from an unpaid volunteer position because I had economic security, social support, and racial positioning that made stepping back possible without immediate consequences. Someone whose survival depends on that institutional access—materially, socially, professionally—doesn't have the same option. Hudson can see the mission is lost, but he's still strapped in the APC because there's nowhere else to go.

But privilege enabling departure doesn't make that exit illegitimate. It just means the institutions losing engaged people are selecting for those who either can't afford to leave or can't yet see the gaps. That's not a strategy for improvement. That's a formula for institutional capture by true believers and those without alternatives.

The hardest part isn't leaving. It's what comes after. You're standing outside the thing you used to be part of, watching it continue as if your departure didn't register. The locked cog rituals grind on: more meetings, more calls, more celebrations of metrics that mask failures. The institution doesn't need you specifically—it needs someone to fill the role, and there's always someone.

Meanwhile you're trying to figure out what engagement looks like when you no longer believe in the available institutional forms. Not because you've given up on the outcomes those institutions claim to pursue, but because you can see too clearly how the machinery produces performances instead of results.

I've got a birthday rolling in soon. Start cashing in those "silver fox" discounts. Part of what that age brings—if you're paying attention—is the lived experience of watching systems grind whether you're in them or not. The machinery continues. Sometimes it's more satisfying to be in it, but only at the capacity you can meaningfully sustain. Understanding the landscape, recognizing your distance from actual levers, and choosing where to put limited energy based on what might actually produce results rather than performances.

Hudson was right to call it. The mission was already over. The question for those of us who've walked away isn't whether we're brave or cowardly, engaged or apathetic. It's what we do with the clarity that comes from finally saying what everyone else was too invested to admit: this isn't working, and continuing to pretend it is doesn't help anyone except the people collecting victory laps on someone else's failures.

For now, I've got a guitar coming back from the shop, a batch payment system at the day job launching in two weeks, and a dry cough that's finally clearing. That's enough machinery to be in. The rest can wait until I have capacity to give it, if I ever do.

Game over doesn't mean giving up. Sometimes it just means you've finally finished the math.