> If I live my life like that, I would be living as if I already lived in a police state by my own choice. That seems counter productive.
No, that is how you prevent a police state.
I mean, obviously you don't actually live as if you already lived in a police state, but you take some of the same precautions, which all boil down to keeping power distributed.
That's the whole point of democracy, really: We make our political system deliberately inefficient by making sure that the amount of power that's concentrated in any single person's hands is limited, and the only reason we do that is to limit the damage when the wrong person gets into a position of power. If there is one thing we absolutely should have learned from history by now, it is that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous.
Also, much of this is not about individuals, and it's not black and white. Authoritarian regimes don't care about most individuals. This is about power structures in a society as a whole. A dictator wants to know the top 100000 or so individuals that could be dangerous to their power in order to be able to concentrate their efforts on keeping them under control. Even if your political disinterest is no risk at all to the dictator's power position, the fact that they can tell you apart from the dissident next door helps them staying in power. And all of that is gradual, it's all an economic question in the end: How much effort does it take to prevent everyone from successfully challenging the dictator's authority? Every additional person you need in your secret police in order to maintain your power makes things harder, everything that a computer can just tell you makes it easier.
So, you have to think not from the standpoint of an individual and what someone could do to target you specifically (which usually is impractical to protect against, and is unnecessary in a stable social structure), but from the standpoint of someone trying to gain power over a large social structure (such as a dictator in a country--but really, it's not in any way tied even to political positions, it might just as well be the head of a company trying to establish themselves as a de-facto monopoly, say), and what makes it easier for them to gain and to maintain power, and what hinders them, on the scale of the society as a whole. And you have to realize that a lot of this is path-dependent: It's a lot harder to remove a dictator once they are in place than to prevent them. So, reactionary solutions don't really work. In simple terms: You can vote a dictator in, but you can not vote a dictator out.