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How healthy and productive is it to adopt the mental framework that the world, along with all of its problems, is simply nature, and so is amoral and immutable, which means we should expend no energy trying to change it, and should instead focus on making sense of as much as we can while adapting to the reality as it is?
I consider myself psychologically even-keeled and don't doomscroll, but unless you actively try to avoid information, nasty stuff inevitably seeps through. For instance, I saw in the last 24 hours a surveillance video of someone carjacking a poor helpless woman at the gas station, and another who wrote that they know of a backyard puppy breeder who has four bitches constantly getting pregnant and living in filth just to cheaply breed and sell puppies for some absurd sum. I think the normal reaction is to feel a combination of anger and sadness. But rationally, that emotional response seems pointless. It's easy to point to greater suffering in quantity and magnitude in Ukraine or Niger, and I'm not sure what's the point of thinking about that either.
I realized that it would be much simpler to frame everything as nature and natural. Crying over a mouse being gobbled up by an owl seems as pointless as doing the same for a fly being caught by a Venus flytrap or a blueberry being decomposed by fungi. These things just happen. I'm not super familiar with zen or its equivalent. Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
At any rate, I plan to remind myself of this whenever I feel any emotion the next time I see a headline that some DA dropped charges against repeat criminals or some author pulled her novel because some nobody complained that she was culturally appropriating an oppressed minority group. Nothing to see here--it's all part of nature. Understand how it works, make sure you're not the mouse/fly/blueberry, and move on happily with your own life.
I notice that all your examples don't affect you. Just to be clear, would you tell yourself to act the same if you were the victim of those things?
The point is to do better. It is to insist that those with the power to affect change do better. I understand that you personally cannot alter the course of events in Ukraine. But an ocean is a trillion drops of water, an avalanche is a trillion snowflakes, and likewise, the world gets better with each successful individual act of doing better.
I'll go one step further. A great many things would improve if people didn't try to insist on some "nature" equivalent of the just world hypothesis. Humans have remarkable ability to not only learn morality, but to implement it in their own lives. The fact that some have a predisposition towards doing unjust things is not a defense, because if your urges to act immorally are so strong, then you have forsaken some claim of being a wholly reasonable person who is due the rights privileges given by default.
That article claimed Russia was openly waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in but never provided any evidence to back this statement. Funnily enough the author of the article seems to be the disinformation Mary Poppins.
But why on Earth would «Russia» not wait for Ukraine fatigue to set in? I don't think some evidence like a document must be shown, it's just common sense and the burden of proof is on you. Pro-Z Russians I know are very explicitly banking on it, channelling Kremlin beliefs. And of course it's expected of them – the whole thing is revealed as senseless struggle the moment you accept that the US and by extension «the West» won't stop backing Ukraine. Which they won't of course: no matter how tired proles get, how many new current things they pivot to in the attention economy, they won't become pro-Russian (not with how Putin acts anyway; @Dean details a plausible rationale, but I think there's conscious reveling in depravity too, certain edgelording, Putin has an adolescent's sense of humor); and it will remain political suicide and betrayal of the premise of NATO to actually abandon Ukrainian cause.
The US, as a geopolitical entity, actually values the loyalty of all those peoples in Central Europe/Baltics who are (more than anyone else on the continent) directly interested in the suppression of Russian imperial agenda and aid Ukrainians as their fellow former subjects of the empire, as well as their current shield.
The US also cares directly about the diminution of Russia in the context of American grand strategy (where international economic isolation of China and denial of usable allies to China is the primary objective for the foreseeable future); victorious Russia is a substantially more valuable ally to China than one bogged down in trench warfare and suffering attacks on its capital, so it must not come to exist.
For these and other reasons, whatever fatique will be felt by the NATO camp, it won't be a big factor. But yes, Russians ignore these reasons and absolutely hope it will be, and this has been a consistent theme in the commentary for the whole duration of the war (except the first delusional week or so). This has been a common theme prior to the war, since 2014 at least – «Hohols will freeze to death without our gas» and so on (perfectly mirrored in that Gazprom middle finger to the EU); protracted resource throttling (or even just threatening it) in hopes of getting opposition to yield is a staple of Kremlin playbook, informed by the foundational belief that you can win by continuously imposing costs which translate into fatique and giving up. «These Gayropeans spoiled by their democracy are not tough, they can't endure remotely as much hardship [as our slaves]» is a very typical conviction both of authoritarians and of their powerless supporters and in Russia it has perhaps been developed into its ultimate form of a pervasive philosophical attitude to life. It's wrong about the other side, and it's mostly empty posturing with regard to one's own, these people aren't prepared for meaningful sacrifices, nor do they really care about the goal such as taking Ukraine, indeed most of them feel war fatique and would've given up if it were up them. But to the extent that they have something like strategy, all pro-war Russians from P. himself do the lowest Z conscript do pin their hopes on war fatigue in the West.
I’m not sure that it is sustainable. We’re spending billions a month on propping up the Ukrainian side. Given a lot of other needs at home, I don’t think you can keep doing that and still maintain power in a democracy. The public isn’t opposed to independence for Ukraine, but they’re also not nearly as engaged as they were a year ago. A year later I would expect even less interest. If some other crisis comes in, I would expect there’s going to be a formidable anti-war backlash.
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Never say never. Trump has openly said he would blackmail Ukraine into surrendering, and he currently has a runaway chance to be the RNom. There's no guarantee that would actually happen if he became president again since Trump is a waffle and if the people surrounding him (e.g. Kushner) or cable news pundits are all against it then he could soften his approach. But he could also very much... just do what he's saying he will, and the modern US political system centralizes an overwhelming amount of military power in the chief executive, so dissenting Dems + Repubs in Congress would have little recourse.
A critical reason this war is going to be a long one is because the question of "which side benefits from a drawn out war of attrition" is very unsettled.
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