I’m Done Feeding the Machine
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
I’m done feeding the machine—
the one that runs on reaction,
on explanation,
on my willingness
to stay engaged long after meaning
has evacuated the room.
It does not want resolution.
It wants fuel.
Attention.
Correction.
Outrage.
Hope.
Anything that proves
it still occupies space
inside my nervous system.
I have learned how it works.
How silence feels like starvation to it.
How indifference registers as threat.
How absence is the one thing
it cannot metabolize.
So I am withdrawing my labour.
No more clarifications
that will be misquoted.
No more good faith
offered to bad intent.
No more emotional expenditure
in systems designed
to convert sincerity into spectacle.
This is not restraint.
It is strategy.
I am no longer confusing engagement
with impact,
or noise
with power.
The machine will rattle.
It always does.
It will escalate.
Invent urgency.
Reframe my refusal
as cruelty, arrogance, fear.
But machines do not get to decide
what participation costs.
I am reclaiming my attention—
the most finite resource I have ever owned.
I am letting the machine
go hungry.
Not out of spite.
Out of clarity.
I am no longer available
to be consumed.
And without fuel,
even the loudest mechanisms
eventually go quiet.
I will be elsewhere—
building a life
that does not require
my constant reaction
to exist.
I’m done feeding the machine.
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