Refusal can mean permanent presence inside society, not exit from it

Evidence

But beyond showing that refusal is possible—highlighting the “cracks” in the crushingly habitual—Diogenes also has much to teach us about how to refuse. It’s important to note that, faced with the unrelenting hypocrisy of society, Diogenes did not flee to the mountains (like some philosophers) or kill himself (like still other philosophers). In other words, he neither assimilated to nor fully exited society; instead he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 253

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core answer to the withdrawal misreading: refusal is neither assimilation nor exit but continued presence.
• DEEPTHINKING: The trilemma (assimilate, exit, or stay-in-refusal) is a genuinely dense frame for what attention-redirection-as-resistance looks like — the exact load-bearing move of the whole book.