On Showing Up
I voted this morning.
It is election day in New York City. We are electing a new mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough presidents, City Council members, and judges. There are also six ballot proposals on the back of the ballot that will shape how this city operates for years to come.
Designing Beyond Yourself
I spend a lot of time on this platform talking about designing your life. About making intentional choices. About stepping off autopilot and creating something that reflects your values rather than defaulting to someone else's blueprint.
But here is what I have been thinking about lately: you cannot design your life in isolation from the world around you.
The policies that get passed. The leaders who get elected. The infrastructure that gets funded or neglected. The judges who interpret the law. These things shape the landscape in which you are trying to build your life.
You can be as intentional as you want about your career, your finances, your wellness. But if the systems around you are designed to make thriving harder—if housing is unaffordable, if public transit is unreliable, if safety is unequal—your individual choices can only take you so far.
This is why showing up matters. This is why participation is not just civic duty—it is part of designing the conditions under which you can actually thrive.
The Fragile Thread of Trust
There is something else I have been thinking about as I watch this election cycle unfold. Something that makes participation feel both more urgent and more precious than it has in years past.
We are living in a moment where truth itself feels under siege.
In January 2024, thousands of New Hampshire voters received robocalls featuring what sounded like President Biden's voice telling them not to vote in the state's primary. It was not Biden. It was a deepfake created with artificial intelligence.¹ In Slovakia, just days before their 2023 election, AI-generated audio impersonating a liberal candidate discussing plans to rig votes went viral on social media.² In India's 2024 elections, AI-generated deepfakes showed celebrities endorsing opposition parties, spreading across WhatsApp and YouTube.³
According to fraud detection experts, there was a three thousand percent increase in deepfake attempts in 2023.⁴ Face-swapping technology has become so sophisticated that distinguishing real from fake is increasingly difficult—even for experts.
But here is what keeps me up at night more than the deepfakes themselves: legal scholars have warned about something called the "liar's dividend"—the idea that as the public becomes more aware that video and audio can be convincingly faked, some will try to escape accountability for their actual actions by denouncing authentic evidence as deepfakes.²
Think about that for a moment. We are approaching a reality where truth becomes impossible to verify. Where authentic footage can be dismissed as fake. Where fabricated content can sway elections before anyone has time to fact-check or debunk it.
As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, while the worst-case AI scenarios did not materialize in 2024, these tools are already eroding public trust in elections by making it harder to distinguish fact from fiction, intensifying polarization, and undermining confidence in democratic institutions.³
This is not a distant, hypothetical threat. It is happening now. And it will only accelerate.
Why I Still Showed Up
So why did I vote this morning, knowing all of this?
Because participation is a choice I make for myself, not a statement about the system.
I do not vote because I think it will fix everything. I do not vote because I believe the process is perfect or even particularly functional most of the time. I vote because the alternative—sitting out and hoping someone else makes better decisions on my behalf—has never worked out well for me.
There is a practical reality here: someone is going to make these decisions whether I participate or not. Someone is going to decide how my tax dollars are spent. Someone is going to shape the policies that affect my daily life. I would rather have a say in who that someone is.
It is less about optimism and more about pragmatism. Less about faith in the system and more about recognizing that opting out does not protect you from the consequences. It just removes you from the conversation.
The Quiet Work of Participation
Voting is not glamorous. It does not feel like a grand gesture. You stand in line. You fill in some bubbles. You get a sticker. You go about your day.
But it is one of the few moments where you get to participate in designing something bigger than yourself. Where your voice—however small it feels—becomes part of the collective decision about what kind of city, state, or country we are building together.
Every system we have was designed by people. Which means it can be redesigned by people. And redesign starts with participation.
If you are someone who is committed to living intentionally, to making deliberate choices about how you spend your time and energy, then civic participation is part of that work. The infrastructure that supports your thriving—or undermines it—is shaped by the people who show up.
What Comes Next
I do not have easy answers about how we navigate a world where AI-generated misinformation becomes the norm. I do not know how we rebuild trust in institutions that feel increasingly fragile. I do not know how we teach an entire population to think critically about everything they see and hear.
But I do know this: we figure it out together, or we do not figure it out at all.
The systems we are trying to navigate were built by people showing up. And they will be rebuilt—or not—by whether we continue to show up, even when it is hard. Especially when it is hard.
So I voted this morning. Not because I think it will solve everything. But because showing up is part of designing the world I want to live in. Because participation is how we signal what we value. Because opting out does not protect you from the consequences—it just removes your voice from the conversation.
And that choice—that small act of showing up—matters more than it ever has.
Sources
[1] Weiner, D., et al. "AI fakes raise election risks as lawmakers and tech companies scramble to catch up." NPR, February 8, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/02/08/1229641751/ai-deepfakes-election-risks-lawmakers-tech-companies-artificial-intelligence
[2] Mirza, R. "How AI deepfakes threaten the 2024 elections." The Journalist's Resource, February 16, 2024. https://journalistsresource.org/home/how-ai-deepfakes-threaten-the-2024-elections/
[3] Panditharatne, M., Narang, N., and Norden, L. "Gauging the AI Threat to Free and Fair Elections." Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/gauging-ai-threat-free-and-fair-elections
[4] "AI vs Democracy: Disinformation, Deepfakes & 2024 US Election." Tech Informed, October 22, 2024. https://techinformed.com/ai-disinformation-2024-us-election-deepfakes-voter-manipulation/
