Meekly sipping a herbal tea in the corner of the Sidgwick Buttery this morning, I watched some unassuming omnivore enjoy a pain au chocolat and a cappuccino. Lucky for him, languishing vegan I am this month, I did not have the strength to jump the tables between us and snatch his breakfast from him. I watched him and felt the unbearable burden of ‘Veganuary’, a pain that is definitively not au chocolat.

The self-deluded optimism of January is coming to an end. As week two bleeds into three and we creep towards the middle of term, standing to attention and ‘being the best you can possibly be!’ slumps into the familiar ‘do what you have to do to get by’.

Indifference is hard. Feeling it and acting it are two very different things. For example, if someone I can’t recall swiping ‘Yes’ to on Tinder sends me a message asking what I’m up to, featuring an emoji of their choice to construct the illusion of wit or charm without wasting characters, I will probably feel indifferent and not deign to respond. If someone I lust after sends me an identical message (and discards the emoji), I must labour over an erudite response that creates the apparition of nonchalance while dripping with allure.

The problem is that the politics of indifference work. We’re all playing hard to get, although we are probably hard to want. Take this hypothetical relationship into the physical realm and you may arrive at the impasse that is the orgasm gap. The restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally is still depressingly relevant: a LOT of women fake orgasms for many different reasons. (I do not, on principle – the bedroom is one of the few places I try to be sincere and leave my incendiary sense of humour elsewhere).

Where else are we settling for less than happiness? How about the majority that left their homes back in May and voted for the re-election of the status quo?

Yes, that is where the orgasm gap chat was heading – talk about anticlimactic. If you think politics is best left outside the bedroom, I will remind you that we are taxing some of the most disadvantaged families in the country for the luxury of that room. If you think that I shouldn’t use a sexual allegory to talk about David Cameron, I will excuse myself for crassness, and remind you that he is fucking all of us.

I found myself reading articles about the ‘apathetic’ British people. Apathetic was understood as being fine with things as they are. Who these apathetic voters are, I haven’t really been able to discern anywhere. It is my suspicion that no such ‘they’ exists, as to homogenise the voting people in this way is both patronising and lazy.

These arguments have their merit, but what offends me is the self-congratulatory cleverness of the style. When an argument is laid out in such a sequential manner, using such sterile language, the intent becomes so much more insidious. The impetus to respond and debate feels irrational. To read articles that present a seemingly airtight response to outspoken politicians and public unrest really, really pisses me off.

Mostly this is because I don’t look around me and see apathy, but rather antipathy. Antipathy is not quite so well suited to rhetorical finesse and convention. In its very nature it belongs in the spirit of protest, on the march and on strike. For the sake of recognising the many young people that only feel allegiance to dissent, it needs its own rhetoric. Putting across my own views varyingly leads to me being accused of being flippant or a Trotskyite.

Using the desolate language that creates the illusion of things being just the way they are is bound to create an illusion of apathy. Even worse, an illusion in which those who are angry (wherever they stand on the political spectrum) are shut down by a false notion of ‘common sense’.

The more power we place on rhetoric, the more we divert the trust we put into politics into the hands of spin-doctors, or the press. Instead, let’s be irreverent, make a little joke out of everything, because at least then nothing seems quite so fixed and unshakeable, and options other than apathy will be a little bit more open to us.