This topic is NOT about whether any particular war is right or wrong, justified or not.
This topic is about the psychology of those of us watching from the sidelines – the comfortable distance from which we consume conflict like entertainment while real people bleed.
Have you noticed how passionate people get about wars they’ll never fight?
How eager they are to debate military strategies from their living rooms, to argue about what should be done while sipping tea or coffee in their pajamas?
There’s something deeply disturbing about our relationship with war, and it reveals something ugly about us humans that most of us would rather not accept.
Let’s start with this truth: There are people out there who are actively looking for war. Not because they want to fight. No, no, no. They want the drama, the story, the sense of purpose that conflict provides from a safe distance.
War gives meaning to lives that feel meaningless.
It provides clear good guys and bad guys in a world that’s usually complex.
It offers a grand story in which generals can project themselves as heroes without ever having to face a single bullet.
Think about it.
When was the last time you heard someone at a dinner passionately arguing for peaceful resolution with the same intensity they bring to debating war or military intervention?
Can you recall the last time someone was as passionate about diplomatic solutions as they are about weapons systems?
The energy around conflict is always higher, always more engaged.
We have created a mental distance that lets us enjoy war without facing its true cost.
We watch drone footage like it’s a video game. We read casualty numbers like sports statistics.
We consume conflict through the sanitized lens of media that shows us just enough to feel informed but never enough to truly understand the horror.
There’s this thought experiment that was once proposed to a U.S. President.
They suggested putting the nuclear launch codes in a capsule implanted next to a volunteer’s heart.
To launch nuclear weapons, the President would have to personally kill that one human being with a knife to get to the codes.
The point was NOT to make nuclear war impossible—it was to force the decision-maker to confront the reality of death directly, to eliminate the mental distance that makes mass killing an abstract concept.
So why do you think that suggestion was never implemented?
Because we don’t actually want to confront the reality of what war is.
We want the sanitized version, the one where we can debate strategy and ethics without ever having to see a child’s body torn apart by a bomb.
We want the movie version, not the reality version.
What we have instead is what psychologists call an “availability cascade.”
We see these vivid images—explosions, military tanks, jets, speeches—and our brains, wired to respond to dramatic stimuli, create an emotional response even if we don’t fully understand what’s happening or what war is really like.
The media feeds us just enough imagery to trigger our emotional responses but never enough to truly educate us about the cost.
And here’s another thing: our brains are wired to get along with the group. The reward of being accepted, of belonging, often outweighs our genuine desire for truth.
So we adopt the group’s position on conflict, whatever that position might be, because it feels good to belong.
We would rather be wrong together than be right alone.
Think about how this plays out in practice. Your social circle leans a certain way on a conflict, and suddenly you find yourself defending that position, not because you’ve done deep research or have personal experience, but because that’s what your friends and family believes.
You start sharing articles that confirm what your group already thinks. You start using the same language, the same talking points, the same emotional triggers.
And if your group supports the war? You get to “take credit for others’ wins.”
You associate yourself with your military strength, with standing up to aggression, with righteousness — all without ever having to risk anything yourself.
It’s like being a sports fan whose team wins. You get to say “we won” even though you never set foot on the field.
But what we’re really avoiding is the actual human cost. The soldiers who come back broken. The families torn apart. The children who lose their parents. The veterans who can’t integrate back into society because they’ve seen and done things that the rest of us can’t even imagine.
We care about these people from a distance, but do we really care about their actual experience?
Or do we just care about the story we tell ourselves about their sacrifice?
And, when I say we “care from a distance,” I mean we focus on the story — the hero’s journey, the noble sacrifice, the fight for freedom—rather than the reality of PTSD, the suicide rates, the destroyed families, the physical and psychological wounds that never fully heal.
We want the clean story, not the messy truth.
This is why most of us prefer NOT to know the full extent of what soldiers actually experience in combat. It’s not just the physical danger to them — it’s also the moral injury, the things they’re asked to do that violate their sense of right and wrong.
It’s easier to support a war when you don’t have to think about the 19-year-old who’s been ordered to shoot first and ask questions later.
And it’s not just about soldiers. We do the same thing with civilian casualties. We turn them into numbers, statistics, “collateral damage.”
We don’t want to think about the family dinner that was interrupted by an explosion, the wedding that became a mass slaughter, the children who now live in constant fear. These things are too real, too immediate, too heartbreaking to fully absorb while maintaining our comfortable distance.
So what’s really happening here?
We’re using war as a form of emotional regulation. It gives us a place to put our fear, our anger, our sense of powerlessness.
It provides clear enemies and simple solutions in a world that usually offers neither. It lets us feel righteous, protective, strong — all from the safety of our homes.
And the media understands this perfectly. They feed us just enough reality to make it feel authentic but filter out enough horror to keep us consuming.
The media knows that if they showed us the full truth—the faces of the dying, the screams of the wounded, the exhausted soldiers who’ve seen too much—we’d have to confront something in ourselves that we’re not ready to face.
This is the psychology of the spectator’s war.
We want the drama without the trauma. We want the meaning without the mortality.
We want to be part of something larger than ourselves without actually risking anything of ourselves.
But here’s my question for you: what does this say about us as a society? What does it say about our character that we can casually debate life-and-death decisions over lunch?
That we can weigh the pros and cons of military intervention like we’re discussing restaurant choices?
I’m NOT saying we should never support military action or always oppose it. I’m saying that if you’re going to have strong opinions about war, you better be honest about what war actually is.
You better acknowledge that real human beings—not just numbers, not just statistics, but individual people with families and dreams and fears just like you and me — will suffer and die based on those opinions.
And maybe, just maybe, before you get too comfortable in your couch, you should ask yourself: am I supporting this because it’s truly necessary, or because it makes me feel better about my own life? Am I advocating for war because it’s the right thing to do, or because it gives me something to be passionate about in an otherwise mundane life?
The truth is, most of us will never know what it’s like to be in actual war.
Most of us will never have to make life-and-death decisions. Most of us will never carry the weight of taking a life.
So the least we can do is have some humility about what we don’t know.
The least we can do is recognize that our comfort comes from our distance, and that distance doesn’t make us wise—it makes us ignorant.
War is not a movie.
War is not a video game.
War is not politics.
War is human beings inflicting unspeakable horrors on other human beings, and everyone involved pays a price.
The soldiers, the civilians, the families at home—everyone loses something.
