There’s a saying I keep coming back to: once the woods get big enough, you’ll find every kind of bird in them. The older I get, the more true it feels.
Over the past couple of days, the Iran–Israel conflict has escalated dramatically. Factories have shut down, civilians are fleeing, ordinary people are being pushed into panic and uncertainty, and daily life has become unbearable for those caught in it.
I’m not interested here in taking sides or offering geopolitical commentary. What has unsettled me most is something much closer: some people around me seem genuinely fascinated by war, even excited by the possibility of it.
I find that almost impossible to understand. It feels inhuman, completely beyond empathy. For a moment, it even made me question myself—whether there was something wrong with my own values because I could not relate to that mindset at all.
One line in particular has stayed with me: “World War III is about to begin. Great.”
Great? What exactly is supposed to be great about war?
Think about it seriously for even a second: when war starts, who comes out of it well? Who is living comfortably in that situation? Do you imagine you’ll be spared the fear, the loss, the chaos, the arbitrary cruelty? If things truly spiral, do you want to be sent to the front as a disposable piece on an old man’s chessboard—used to block bullets, burned up as cannon fodder, and forgotten just as quickly?
Or do you believe war is some shortcut to personal transformation, a violent reset button that will magically fix the parts of your life you hate? Do you think a miserable family situation, social resentment, or private frustration somehow becomes meaningful once bombs start falling?
Maybe you’ve consumed so much war content that you’ve started confusing fantasy with reality. Maybe hours spent on FPS games or military videos have convinced you that you’d step onto a battlefield and suddenly become heroic, effective, even glorious. In reality, not begging to die slowly and helplessly would already count as luck. If war ever reached you, all those rehearsed fantasies and armchair tactics would be tested against terror, pain, and pure survival.
This is what happens when people live too long at a safe distance from violence: they forget what war actually is. It gets aestheticized, dramatized, turned into spectacle, meme, discourse, entertainment. And once war is entertainment, people like this start to appear—people who can watch others lose homes, livelihoods, and peace of mind, and still talk about global catastrophe as if it were something exciting.
That, more than anything, is what I can’t accept.