My Ukrainian friend from Kiev is visiting for a week because she needs a ‘war cation‘ as she calls it herself. “How wonderful it feels to be on NATO territory!” she texts as she crosses the Polish border. In a lunch place, she tells me that she hopes a break from the danger of war will be good for her mental health. After her journalistic travels along the eastern and southern fronts, and since she went to sleep on a yoga mat in the bathroom in her apartment in Kiev from the outbreak of the war because it was not safe with the glass of the bedroom windows, they ‘work on her’war life balance‘”.
My own war life balance has also been a cause for concern for some time. But not in the same way, of course. Because Ukraine is close to my heart, the war completely dominated my life at first, but now it is one of the many news topics I scroll through. I try to think about what it is like now with the people from Mariupol who have been deported to Russian camps. I also try to remember to eat more legumes.
There’s no other way, I know that. You can get used to everything. Just as you cannot be aware of the size of the universe all the time, you cannot feel the world’s suffering every second. Good thing, too. Banality is also hidden in large, incomprehensible events. Just as at a funeral you are first overcome by the realization of your own mortality, and two seconds later you think: those sunglasses in the fourth row, would such a frame fit the shape of my head? That, par excellence, is the human experience.
Even in the most extreme situation, you cannot be in a state of sustained emergency. Ultimately, it is also possible to get bored in Auschwitz, concluded Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész in his book Undetermined by fate.
My Ukrainian girlfriend and I walk out of the lunch tent and come across a protest procession whose exact purpose is unclear. It is mainly for farmers and against vaccinations and basically against everything. “War begins where justice ends,” I translate one of the slogans for her. A few people are waving an FVD flag. “These people see themselves as resistance heroes against tyranny,” I explain. Together we watch in silence at the police cars accompanying the protest.
These protesters are also working on their war life balance. But as resistance fighters, they are looking for a little more war grandeur in their lives. As Fukuyama said, boredom makes you rebel. Man needs a certain heroism, the feeling that he sometimes experiences something deeply meaningful. But liberal parliamentary democracy is post-heroic, and with its dull compromises and slow decision-making, it fails to meet that need. If you war life balance gets disturbed, you start looking for the problems.
It is strange that FVD members, who have been saying for years that the West is perishing due to decadence and victim culture, do not quench their thirst for heroism with support for Ukraine, but follow Putin. If I see anywhere a consumerist void, it is in Putin’s eyes. He is possibly the richest man in the world, and is in a relationship with a former gymnast who is said to be the most flexible woman in the world. In short: he has everything. And so undoubtedly suffers from deep existential boredom. Surely this war is also a means to war life balance to straighten out.
We walk on, and my friend complains that since the air raids her Ukrainian friends jump startled at every unexpected noise. “Maybe they’re just traumatized?” I suggest. “Yes, no doubt,” she says. “Some people also get traumatized from everything.”
Eva Peek is NRC editor. Kiza Magendane is off this week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 5, 2022
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