A while back, I was standing in a kitchen with a friend who was telling me, quite seriously, about his battle with sugar. He had been fighting it for the better part of a year. He had a strategy. He had allies. But he had a general sense that the enemy was winning. He had become tired.
I asked him, gently, when sugar had declared war on him.
He looked at me for a moment. Laughed. And then stopped.
Neither of us said anything for a while. We stood in his kitchen, in the small silence that follows when someone realizes they've been fighting a war no one actually started. Not against the sugar. Against a version of himself he had been told was the enemy. He had been enlisted without knowing it, in a war no one had declared. Against a body that was mostly minding its own business, and a mind that had been taught to see it as a threat.
I want to write about the wars we did not declare. Modern life is full of them, and most of that tiredness you feel comes from fighting on fronts you never chose.
§ I.Every problem is a war now.
Somewhere in the last century, the word war jumped its banks. It used to mean a specific and terrible thing. Nations, weapons, a formal declaration, an eventual armistice or a graveyard. Now it means something looser. It is a word casually tossed into any conversation or topic.
We have a war on cancer, a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a war on obesity, a war on aging. We have culture wars and mommy wars and cancel wars. Corporations fight for market share. Politicians run campaigns, which is itself a military word, and then wage battles for the base. You are told to fight for your marriage, fight for your health, fight for your dreams, fight to make partner, fight to stay young. Every relationship is a battlefield, every diet a campaign, every project a mission. Even sleep has been enlisted. There are books on the market right now called things like The Sleep Revolution, which is one metaphor away from calling it a war.
None of these people are lying. They are just reaching for the biggest word they have to describe something that matters to them, and war is the biggest word we have.
But the word carries a shape. Once you accept the shape, you accept everything else the shape implies. There is an enemy. There is a front. There is a right side and a wrong side. There is no time for questions, because there is a war going on. There is no room for tenderness, because tenderness costs lives. Most of all, there is no possibility of simply not fighting. In a war, that is called desertion.
The fighting comes free with the metaphor. The metaphor was handed to you. You did not choose it. And yet here you are, at four in the morning, tired, in a war you did not declare, against an enemy you would not recognize on the street.
§ II.What the frame costs you.
I want to be careful here, because I don't think the war frame is always wrong. I do not want to be one more essayist telling you to be softer with yourself. There is a place for real ferocity. There is a place for the word.
But watch what happens to a person who lives inside this frame too long.
They lose the middle. In a war, there is no middle. There are only sides. So when your father votes differently than you do, he is no longer seen as a person you love who is wrong about something, but a combatant. When your body does not lose the weight, it becomes not a body you live in, but a front. When the diagnosis comes, or the layoff, or the drift, it becomes not a season you have to move through, but a battle you are losing. The war frame flattens everything into won or lost. And most of a life is neither.
They lose rest. Wars do not permit rest. There is always another push. Another campaign. Another battle to lose sleep over. If your work is a war, you cannot stop working; there is a war on. If your marriage is a battle, you cannot exhale; the front is active. If your health is a fight, you cannot simply be a person in a body; you are a soldier in a body, and soldiers do not get off duty. Whole lifetimes are burned this way, on hills that were never worth taking, in wars that turn out, on the other side of them, to have been mostly an idea or betrayal of something you once thought to be right.
They lose the ability to make peace. Because peace, in a war frame, is what the loser does. Peace is surrender. Peace is what happens when you give up the fight. So they cannot make peace with their bodies, their parents, their choices, their pasts, their pain. They can only keep fighting, or lose. The middle option, the older option, the option every wise tradition has quietly recommended for thousands of years, is not visible from inside the frame.
§ III.Some things really are wars.
I want to be honest, because a piece like this can slide too easily into a soft, universal pacifism, and I don't believe in that either.
Some things are actual wars. Real ones. There are people fighting and dying, right now, in wars that were declared by governments, and whatever I write about metaphors is a small and abstract thing next to what they are living. I am not writing about them. What I am writing about does not diminish what they are going through, and I would not want a soldier or anyone with actual skin in an actual conflict to read this and think I was arguing that all wars are just framing. Some are not framing. Some are the thing itself, and they deserve the full weight of the word.
And some smaller conflicts, closer to your life, are also real. If someone is hurting a child, that is not a conversation about parenting styles. If someone is destroying your ability to think, or eat, or move safely through the world. That is not a tension in the relationship. There are moments when the war word is the right word, and the right response is to fight, to fight seriously, and to keep fighting until the danger is past.
The test, as always with this publication, is whether. Whether the enemy is real. Whether the danger is present. Whether the person calling this a war is you, or someone who benefits from your fighting. Whether the fight, if you sit still with it long enough, is one you would choose from a quieter place.
Real wars, you know. You do not need someone to tell you. The wars that need a marketing budget are usually not real.
§ IV.How to decline a war that isn't yours.
Practically, the work is small, and it starts with a question.
Who declared this? Trace the war frame back to its origin. Did you declare a war on sugar? Or did sugar find you already slipping and get behind your battle lines? Or was it in language you inherited, a fight you were signed up for by a magazine cover you read at nineteen? Someone drew the map. Someone named the enemy. Almost always, that someone was not you. Just noticing this is most of the work.
What am I actually up against? Strip the war language out and see what remains. Instead of fighting sugar, you are noticing that you feel worse when you eat a lot of it and better when you don't. That is not a war. That is a small and useful piece of information about your body. Instead of battling your ex, you are two people who used to love each other and now have to figure out logistics. That is not a war. That is a negotiation, and negotiations end differently than wars do. Instead of fighting aging, you are getting older, which is what people do, and the choice is not whether but how. The war frame was doing all the emotional work. Take it away and the actual situation is almost always smaller, quieter, and more tractable than the war made it seem.
What would peace look like? Not surrender. Peace. A version of the situation where you and the thing you were fighting can coexist, or where the thing can pass through your life on its way somewhere else, or where you can put the weapon down and simply live inside the truth of what is happening. Most so-called wars end this way in real life. Not with victory. With the quiet realization that you were the only one still fighting.
Some wars are yours to fight. And when they are, you will know, and you should fight them well. But most are not. Most are old maps someone handed you at the wrong moment, with the enemy already circled and the objective already assigned. You are allowed to fold the map. You are allowed to sit down. You can take your time in choosing your path. You are allowed to look at the person, the problem or the part of yourself you were told to fight, and decide, quietly, that you would rather choose peace, or war.
Ask whether. Then, if the answer is no, lay it down.