On the ease you did not choose
Beginning this quarter, ambient stress in transit hubs, waiting areas, and public concourses will be lowered to the level a recent study found optimal for civic mood. You may notice the change as a calm you cannot quite account for — a softening of the usual friction of being among strangers.
This is expected. No action is required of you.
Those who prefer the former levels may apply for exemption. To date, the number of applications has not required a form to be designed.
Nothing here was done to anyone. Everything here was done for them. That is the shape almost every entry in this archive takes — a kindness, offered, accepted, and only much later revealed to have edges. The last line is the one to sit with: not that no one refused, but that refusing had become so rare no one thought to make it possible.