Priya Parker says healthy relationships need a good fight. Fine. But between drone wars, respawn buttons, SSRIs and the weekly shot, we’ve engineered every fight out of existence, and the bill for avoidance is coming due with interest.
—Last Saturday, The Daily aired an episode featuring Priya Parker, author of the new book “The Art of Fighting,” and her argument goes something like this: healthy human connection requires conflict. Not avoiding it. Not smiling through it. Actually having it. Groups that never fight don’t stay healthy, she says. They stay quiet, which is different, in the same way that a marriage where nobody has spoken since 2019 is technically “low-conflict.”
—Parker is right. She is so right that I got out of my car and applauded, which alarmed the people at the gas station.
—But here is my problem. Parker, bless her, only took us to the tip of the conflict iceberg. And the iceberg is worth looking at, because as a society we are not merely avoiding it. We are down there with blowtorches, working three shifts, frantically trying to sink the whole thing.
—Allow me to finish the job she started.
—War From the Couch
—Start with the most extreme form of human conflict ever devised: war. Even war, the one arena where conflict is famously mandatory, has become an exercise in conflict avoidance. Modern warfare is drones. It is long-range missiles. It is a nineteen-year-old in a climate-controlled trailer moving a joystick, and somewhere over the horizon something very bad happens to someone he will never see, smell, or have to look in the eye.
—It is, in other words, a video game. Which brings me to my next point, and I want you to know I have been waiting thirty years to make it.
—Blame Halo. I Do.
—It all started, really, with the video games. Halo. Call of Duty. An entire generation raised on shooting and killing people in virtual waves, and here is the genius part, the part that rewired everything: when you die, you don’t die. You respawn. You come right back to the battlefield, fully armed, mildly annoyed, ready to go again.
—Think about what that teaches. Conflict has no cost. Struggle has no consequence. Death itself is a loading screen. You cannot lose, not really, and therefore nothing is truly at stake, and therefore nothing has to be felt.
—Now, I am not saying video games caused everything wrong with society. I am saying they were the training wheels. The rest of us grew up and found the adult versions, which come in pill form and are covered, in many cases, by insurance.
—The Ultimate Conflict Remover
—Consider the SSRI. If you wanted to design the ultimate conflict remover, you could not do better. I’m feeling stressed. I’m feeling anxious. I’m feeling overwhelmed. And along comes a medication that smooths it all down, and let me be clear because this is important: they are very helpful and they work. Millions of people function today who could not function before, and if that’s you, God bless you and keep taking them, because this is a newspaper column and not a prescription pad.
—But we should at least be honest about the bargain. Somewhere in that helpful smoothing, we become complicit in not developing the ability to have healthy conflict. Worse, we lose the ability to even know what is bothering us. Anxiety, for all its misery, used to be a messenger. It banged on the door at 3 a.m. and yelled, “Hey! Your job is wrong! Your marriage needs work! You hate your commute and you haven’t called your mother!” We didn’t like the messenger, so we medicated the messenger, and now the door is quiet and we have no idea what the message was.
—Parker says we need to lean into conflict. How do you lean into a conflict you can no longer locate?
—The Struggle Formerly Known as Dieting
—And now, just when you thought the pharmaceutical industry had removed every available struggle, comes the GLP wave, and it has taken weight-loss conflict out of the scenario entirely.
—Understand what just vanished. What used to be an internal struggle, a genuine daily battle that manifested itself on the bathroom scale, is gone. The old fight required you to diet, to exercise, and, hardest of all, to actually look at what was emotionally needed in your life. Why am I eating this? What hole am I filling? What am I avoiding by standing in front of this refrigerator at midnight like it’s a shrine?
—Those were the questions. That was the conflict. And the conflict, as Parker would tell you, was the point. It was where the growth lived.
—Now? We simply take the shot. Another inner struggle where we would have had to face ourselves, dissolved. The entire epic human battle with appetite, temptation, and self-knowledge has been reduced to two remaining concerns: retaining our muscle mass, and hoping these drugs can be safely taken all the way up to the edge of the afterlife. That’s it. That’s the whole war now. Protein intake and actuarial optimism.
—A Brief Word From the Iceberg
—Add it up. We fight our wars by remote. We rehearsed our violence in games where nobody stays dead. We chemically mute the anxiety that was trying to tell us something. We deleted the oldest struggle in human history, the one between a person and a second helping. At every single level, from the geopolitical to the gastrointestinal, we have engineered the conflict out.
—And here’s the thing we all quietly know, the thing Parker’s whole book is circling: we know the outcome of avoidance. We have always known it. The fight you refuse to have does not disappear. It compounds. It goes underground and collects interest. The couple that never argues divorces “out of nowhere.” The employee who never pushes back quits by email. The country that never talks to itself screams at itself. Avoidance is not peace. Avoidance is a balloon payment.
—The Iceberg Always Wins
—There is a famous ship that also believed the iceberg was mostly not there. It focused on the tip. It had a lovely band. Things went poorly.
—Ninety percent of an iceberg sits below the waterline, and roughly one hundred percent of our conflicts sit below ours, unexamined, unmedicated in the one way that matters, waiting. Parker wants us to learn the art of fighting. I want that too. I want us to reclaim the glorious, sweaty, uncomfortable human birthright of struggling with things: with each other, with our appetites, with our 3 a.m. messengers, with the second helping.
—So here is my modest proposal. Disagree with somebody this week. In person. Someone you love, ideally. Have it out. Say the true thing. Do not respawn, do not medicate the moment, do not order the shot. Just stand there, on the deck, and look directly at the iceberg.
