I thought I had strong rational reasons for having opted out of all the elections for which I’d been eligible since 1992. But something not strictly rational was responsible for the pragmatic turn now in my thinking. Something had driven me to the polls that hadn’t been there before. If I still prided myself on being skeptical of mass hysteria, I had added to it something else: the idea that participation, rational or otherwise, mattered. I had voted not because my doing so could change the outcome, but because voting would change me. Already, like a mutation that happens quietly on a genetic level and later completely alters the body’s function, I could feel my relationship to other Americans changing. I had a sense—dubious to me for so long, and therefore avoided—of common cause.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, Random House, 2016