Wisconsin Man Who Stopped Reading Political Emails in 2008 Is Quietly Winning at Life

The Orderly Chaos | Opinion & Dispatches

A special investigation into America's most dangerous political act: not paying attention.

Dave Schreiber is not famous. He has no verified social media accounts, no Substack, no podcast, and no strong opinions about whatever happened on cable news last Tuesday. He is 47 years old, works as a senior accountant at a mid-sized firm in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, owns a modest three-bedroom home with a functional furnace, has no outstanding medical debt, sleeps approximately seven and a half hours a night, and describes his general mood as "pretty good, mostly."

By any conventional measure of American civic life, Dave Schreiber is a failure.

He has not read a political newsletter since the second term of George W. Bush. He unsubscribed from every campaign email list in 2008 after what he describes as "a moment of clarity during a fundraising drive that used the subject line 'Dave, this is urgent' for the fourteenth consecutive day." He does not watch cable news. He voted in the last two presidential elections, spent roughly 25 minutes total on each decision, and then went home and watched a documentary about bridge engineering.

He is, according to a growing body of entirely informal evidence, doing significantly better than the rest of us.

The Data, Such As It Is

The Orderly Chaos does not, as a matter of policy, conduct rigorous academic research. We do, however, enjoy a well-constructed comparison, and the case of Dave Schreiber presents an unusually compelling one.

The 118th Congress, which sat from January 2023 to January 2025, passed 274 bills into law. Of these, according to an analysis by GovTrack, a significant proportion were ceremonial designations, technical corrections to existing statutes, and — yes — post office renamings. Landmark legislation addressing healthcare costs, housing availability, climate infrastructure, or the national debt was, let's say, sparse.

Dave Schreiber, in the same period, paid off his car, refinanced his mortgage at a favorable rate, completed a certification in forensic accounting, coached his daughter's soccer team to a regional semifinal, read 14 books ("mostly history, a couple thrillers"), and built a deck.

The deck, by his own assessment, is very solid.

"I used pressure-treated lumber," he says. "Did it right."

When asked to comment on the 118th Congress's legislative record by comparison, Dave said he wasn't really sure what was in it and asked if we wanted to see the deck.

We did not make the trip to Fond du Lac. We regret this.

The Industry That Depends on Your Misery

Not everyone is charmed by Dave Schreiber's quiet flourishing. In Washington, a class of professionals has built an entire economic ecosystem on the premise that you — specifically you, and also everyone you know — must be made to feel, at all times, that something catastrophic is approximately 72 hours away.

Political consultants, digital fundraising strategists, outrage-optimization specialists, and what one former staffer described to us as "engagement architects" — people whose entire professional value is predicated on your sustained emotional activation — are, to put it gently, not thrilled about Dave.

"This guy is a real problem," said one digital fundraising consultant, speaking on condition of anonymity because, as he put it, "I have clients." "If everyone did what he's doing, the entire small-dollar donor ecosystem collapses. We need people checking their phones at 11pm. We need people angry about things they can't control. That's the product. He's not buying the product."

A second consultant, who runs what she described as a "civic engagement optimization firm" — which, upon further questioning, turned out to mean she writes alarming subject lines for Senate campaign emails — was more philosophical.

"Look, I respect the choice," she said. "But disengagement is a privilege. Not everyone can just... opt out."

She was then asked whether her firm's emails had ever produced a measurable policy outcome.

There was a pause of approximately four seconds.

"We drove significant list growth in the third quarter of 2022," she said.

The Schreiber Doctrine: An Economic Analysis

For the purposes of this piece, The Orderly Chaos has attempted to construct what we're calling the Schreiber Productivity Index — a rough calculation of personal output versus political input across a 16-year period.

Dave's political inputs since 2008: two presidential votes, four midterm votes, one school board meeting he attended by accident thinking it was a neighborhood association thing, and a single letter to his congressman about a road resurfacing issue (the road was resurfaced in 2019; he considers this his greatest civic achievement).

His political outputs: a well-maintained home, a debt trajectory that is moving in the correct direction, two children who describe him as "pretty chill for a dad," and a resting heart rate of 61 beats per minute, which his doctor has noted is "annoyingly good."

For comparison, the average American who self-identifies as "politically engaged" — defined here as someone who consumes more than two hours of political media per day — reports higher rates of anxiety, disrupted sleep, and what researchers at the American Psychological Association have termed "election stress disorder," a condition that, notably, does not require an election to be actively occurring.

They are also, the data suggests, no more likely to have built a deck.

The Reluctant Candidate

It would be tidy to end this piece with Dave Schreiber continuing his quiet, productive, blissfully low-cortisol life in Fond du Lac, undisturbed by the machinery of democratic participation.

Unfortunately, word got out.

Following a profile in a Wisconsin regional magazine — published without his permission by a journalist friend who described him as "a human control group" — Dave has reportedly been contacted by representatives of two separate political parties, a PAC focused on "common sense governance," and a former congressman who is "exploring options."

All of them want him to run for Senate.

"I told them I wasn't interested," Dave said, when reached by phone for this piece. "They said that was exactly the kind of answer they were looking for."

He is currently reviewing the paperwork. He has not yet responded to any of the emails.

This, political analysts note, already puts him ahead of most incumbents on response time.

The Orderly Chaos reached out to the Office of Administrative Streamlining, the Meridian Institute for Government Efficiency, and four Senate press offices for comment on Dave Schreiber's productivity figures. None responded. Dave responded in eleven minutes. He was, he said, between meetings and had a few minutes.

He asked again about the deck.