Forever Wars Shrink the Future: What Endless War Does to the Human Mind
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about forever wars and what endless war does to the human mind. One note before we get started, I looked at a few other focal points in the research for this topic before settling on this one, including civilian moral injury, how war drives people towards strongmen and bad policy, and the different psychological wounds carried by people in The United States, Iran, and Israel. So if you want episodes on any of those in the future, send me an email and let me know.
Leslie Poston:Or leave a comment on one of the places where you listen to the podcast. When people think about war, they think about the immediate horrors like bombings, death tolls, destroyed homes and schools, or grieving families. But one of war's deepest harms is harder to see. It alters how we relate to time, changing what tomorrow feels like, and whether the future still seems open enough to build toward. That matters, because we don't live only in the present.
Leslie Poston:We live in anticipation planning, imagining, and working toward things that don't exist yet. Humans can tolerate hardship because we believe it leads somewhere. We raise children because we believe there's a world for them to grow into. We save, study, organize, repair relationships, and try to make better lives because we assume there will be a later that can hold all of this effort. Forever war attacks that capacity.
Leslie Poston:It narrows the horizon, teaching us to stop living toward the future and only survive the next emergency. Once a society has been trained to live that way, the damage doesn't end when the bombs stop. It lingers in the nervous system, in public life, in family routines and children's expectations, and even in whether people can still picture a future worth investing in. So today, I want to talk about what endless war does to the mind, to communities, and to the basic human ability to believe in tomorrow. When I say forever war, I don't just mean a single conflict that drags on for years.
Leslie Poston:I mean a broader condition that becomes part of public life with recurring escalation, constant threat, and militarized language. It's a sense that another strike, retaliation, or another emergency announcement could arrive at any moment. Even when a particular round of violence slows down, the war footing remains. This kind of war becomes a type of social weather. It changes the tone of the news and the assumptions people make about safety, politics, and what counts as normal.
Leslie Poston:It leaves the impression on people that peace is fragile, stability is temporary, and catastrophe may be closer than it looks. For people in directly attacked places, this can mean constant danger, grief, displacement, and fear. For people in allied or attacking countries, it can mean dread, shame, helplessness, moral confusion, and the sickening feeling that major acts of violence are being carried out in their name against their will. That last part matters. Polling in The United States in January 2026 found that a strong majority of voters, more than 85%, did not want US military action against Iran.
Leslie Poston:And a strong majority also believed in the constitutional mandate that presidents must seek congressional approval before attacking another country. That means a lot of people were already living with anxiety about war itself, and they were also dealing with the feeling that their consent doesn't matter. Democratic powerlessness isn't a side issue either. It's part of this psychological injury. We've talked in previous episodes about how the human mind struggles under unpredictability, lack of control, and the collapse of trust in the rules.
Leslie Poston:If war can expand despite public opposition and without meaningful accountability, people start to experience the future less as something they can shape and more as something imposed on them. That's one of the first ways Forever War shrinks the future it teaches us that tomorrow belongs to someone else. Future orientation is how we describe the ability to imagine, value, organize toward the future. It's what makes school feel worthwhile, what lets people commit to long projects, build relationships, save money, make sacrifices, and just trust that their efforts now will create something later. It's not some decorative extra on top of our mental health it's part of how our mental life works.
Leslie Poston:Hope, planning, motivation, and resilience are all tied to whether a person can imagine a future that feels real enough to move forward. Research on collective stress suggests that these conditions often narrow future orientation. People become more focused on immediate survival. Their planning window shortens, and long term goals start to feel unrealistic or even absurd. That response makes sense in the short term.
Leslie Poston:If conditions are truly unstable, then paying attention to the present is adaptive. But what helps a person survive acute danger can become destructive when the danger is prolonged, repeated, or politically normalized. A life organized only around the next crisis becomes smaller, and a society organized only around reaction becomes brittle. People stop investing in anything that takes time, including infrastructure and education. They stop imagining change because they stop trusting that their sacrifice will lead anywhere worth going.
Leslie Poston:And this is part of why endless war is so corrosive. It doesn't only produce fear, it distorts the time horizon people use to live their lives by pulling attention toward what is urgent and away from what is meaningful. That pull makes planning feel indulgent, and stability can even feel fake convincing people that survival is the only reasonable goal. Once that happens, the future starts disappearing long before it's materially gone. There's a concept in trauma research that's especially useful here, the sense of a foreshortened future.
Leslie Poston:I don't mean pessimism or a person saying, I think bad things might happen. The concept is closer to a belief that the future itself no longer feels inhabitable. The world doesn't feel dependable enough to lean in to a tomorrow. A person may understand intellectually that time is still moving forward, but emotionally and psychologically, that future stops feeling available. Plenty of people are worried about their individual future, like where to go to school or if they want to have children.
Leslie Poston:A foreshortened future is something a little deeper. It happens when trust in the world is badly damaged, and the ground under ordinary life no longer feels solid. The assumptions that make normal individual and societal planning possible start to break down. People stop expecting continuity, and stop believing that institutions will protect them, or that daily routines will hold, or that the social order is sturdy enough to support their long term goals. War creates exactly those conditions.
Leslie Poston:It teaches people that homes can disappear overnight, that systems fail and leaders lie, and that public institutions might not act in the public interest. In a bombed or occupied country, that lesson arrives through direct violence. In attacking our allied countries, it can arrive through the realization that government action has become detached from the public will, moral limits, and democratic procedure. Once trust in the world has been damaged like that, planning becomes difficult for reasons that are deeper than fear. It's hard to build towards something that no longer feels emotionally real.
Leslie Poston:It's hard to commit to a future when the structure that's supposed to hold that future feels unstable or even hostile. People become estranged from tomorrow. Prolonged crisis can also distort a person's relationship to time itself. Recent wartime research has found links between emotional distress and temporal disorientation, meaning confusion about the passage of time and difficulty imagining the future clearly. Other work on collective trauma points to a similar pattern.
Leslie Poston:Under chronic threat, the connection between past, present, and future becomes strained. A lot of people know a milder version of this feeling. During personal crisis or a period of intense social upheaval, the days blur together. Weeks can vanish, and time somehow feels both fast and stuck. The future becomes foggy.
Leslie Poston:It's hard to remember what happened when, and even harder to picture what comes next. War intensifies all of that, because the uncertainty is not just symbolic. This matters because coherent time is part of coherent selfhood. People tell stories about who they are, by linking where they've been, where they are presently, and where they think they're going. When that chain starts to break, motivation can break with it, and so can identity.
Leslie Poston:Instead of thinking about what kind of life they want to build, people start structuring their lives around alerts, interruptions, and damage control. This is why forever war doesn't just produce fear or grief. It produces a kind of temporal collapse. People get trapped in emergency mode. Their attention narrows, and their sense of direction kind of weakens.
Leslie Poston:The present starts swallowing everything else. And when that present becomes one long emergency, the future is no longer a destination. It's just an abstraction. Research on political violence shows that war does not just wound individuals, it also damages the social and institutional resources people rely on to function. Community trust, public services, health care, schools, and the ability to participate meaningfully in civic life.
Leslie Poston:When those supports weaken or collapse, people lose more than stability in the moment. That helps explain why war rarely harms one part of life at a time the damage from war spreads. A financial hit creates housing stress, and that housing stress creates familial conflict. Family conflict disrupts your sleep, and sleep loss makes emotional regulation harder. Emotional depletion makes planning harder.
Leslie Poston:Planning failure leads to more instability. Before long, a person is not dealing with one problem. They're living inside an accumulating web of strain. This is true in direct conflict zones, but it's not limited to them. War also radiates outward through inflation, shortages, fear, disrupted routines, media saturation, and political instability.
Leslie Poston:Even people living far from the immediate violence can find their lives reorganized around uncertainty and threat. Future thinking requires resources and support. It takes safety to dream and energy to make plans, and enough trust in the world to believe that the effort will matter later. It also takes institutions that function well enough for people to imagine a life beyond survival. When those conditions are repeatedly stripped away, a narrowed future isn't a personal weakness.
Leslie Poston:It's a deeply human response to chronic destabilization. That's one reason I resist shallow language about resilience on this podcast. Too often, it treats people as if they should be able to stay hopeful and strategic no matter how many of the conditions necessary for hope and strategy have been taken from them. But hope and agency aren't magic. If a society keeps draining the resources and supports that make future building possible, shrinking expectations aren't irrational.
Leslie Poston:They're evidence that people are responding to their reality. This isn't a topic where it makes much sense to separate inner life from public life. Research on political violence shows us that the damage doesn't stop with individual symptoms. It also weakens people's ability to participate in social and political life. It erodes community functioning, frays the social trust, and degrades entire institutions.
Leslie Poston:In other words, war harms the mind partly by harming the structures that people rely on to make meaning, exercise agency, and just to live together in a society. This is important because it pushes back on a very narrow version of psychology that treats suffering as if it appears inside people for no reason and should be solved inside people alone. If institutions become less accountable, leaders normalize militarized emergency, the public is ignored, and media systems frame escalation as inevitable, then people's despair, numbness, and alienation are not private defects. They are grounded responses to social conditions. Endless war can also change what people expect from politics itself.
Leslie Poston:They might stop believing public participation matters, grow cynical, withdrawn, fatalistic, or more willing to accept authoritarian logic because everything already feels unstable. The lesson becomes simple and dangerous. That ordinary people don't really shape history, powerful people do. That lesson shrinks the future in a profound way. A future is not just a personal timeline.
Leslie Poston:It's also a shared civic project. If people stop believing they can influence public life, they stop investing in the slow work of democratic repair and stop imagining institutions that could function differently. They stop seeing peace, justice, or accountability as things that can be built. My point is not that politics affects mood. My point is that war reorganizes mental life through structures, systems, and collective conditions.
Leslie Poston:That's part of the psychology, not a distraction from it. There's an obvious moral difference between living under bombardment and consuming war through screens from far away. These are not comparable experiences, and they should never be treated as though they are. But distance doesn't mean immunity from the harms of war either. Research on collective trauma and media exposure has found that repeated exposure to graphic and distressing coverage contributes to acute stress and post traumatic stress symptoms, especially in people who are already vulnerable or strongly identified with what they're watching.
Leslie Poston:We've seen versions of this pattern after terrorist attacks, mass violence, violent and unlawful ICE occupations of cities, and other public trauma. The nervous system can still be shaped by repeated mediated exposure, especially when the imagery is constant and the threat feels unresolved. This helps explain why people far from a blast zone may still find themselves anxious, numb, compulsively checking the news, unable to focus, or caught in cycles of doom scrolling and despair. Some people shut down because they just can't absorb one more moral horror. Others become hypervigilant and monitor every update, as if staying formed might somehow restore control.
Leslie Poston:Neither pattern supports a healthy relationship to the future. There's also a specific burden for people in countries backing or launching the violence, and that burden is implication. It's the feeling that your government, your taxes, or your national identity are tied to actions you did not choose and may actively oppose. That can produce shame, helplessness, fragmentation, anger, and withdrawal. Civic belonging starts to feel contaminated.
Leslie Poston:Public life starts to feel less like something you participate in and more like something that happens over your head. And that too shrinks the future. People stop seeing themselves as potential authors of change and start feeling like passengers trapped inside a machine they can't steer. Any conversation about the future must include children because childhood is where people first learn whether the world is stable enough to grow into. Research on children and youth in conflict affected areas has repeatedly found elevated rates of anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress, and developmental disruption.
Leslie Poston:Studies of war exposed youth also suggest that violence can shape how young people think about their own futures, including whether adulthood feels possible, desirable, or safe. This matters beyond symptom lists. Children are not only processing events, they're building a worldview. They're learning whether adults can protect them, whether institutions can be trusted, whether routines hold, if safety is real, and whether tomorrow is something to expect or something to fear. Repeated exposure to war, displacement, grief, and political instability teaches lessons that go far beyond one conflict.
Leslie Poston:Even children living outside the immediate war zone are learning from what adults around them normalize. They watch which deaths get mourned and which deaths get rationalized. They notice whether leaders can override public opposition. They absorb the language of expendability. They see whether violence is treated as tragic, inevitable, or useful.
Leslie Poston:They learn what kind of future adults are willing to hand to them. So when we talk about forever war shrinking the future, this is one of the clearest places we can see it. War does not just damage people who are already adults, it also trains children into a world where instability feels normal and hope feels fragile. That's not a temporary injury. That's an inheritance.
Leslie Poston:I don't want to end this episode with some polished little line about resilience that puts all the burden back on ordinary people. Certainly, human beings can survive extraordinary hardship, but survival is not the same as having a future. Resilience is not a substitute for peace, accountability, community, or material stability. The research here points in a more grounded direction. Meaning, social support, and agency matter.
Leslie Poston:People cope better with collective trauma when they're not isolated, when they can make sense of what's happening, when they have real support, and when they have some reason to believe their actions still matter. But private coping isn't enough if the public conditions that produce despair remain intact. So what can expand the future again? Real ceasefires that actually end the conflict instead of hiding it from the media, expand it. Democratic accountability, honest journalism, functional schools and functional health care, housing stability, communities that know how to make room for grief, and collective action.
Leslie Poston:All of these expand it because they restore a sense that people are not only reacting to history, but shaping it. Peace isn't just the absence of bombs. It's the return of a believable tomorrow. It's the restoration of enough safety, trust, agency that people can start planning again, loving again, building again, and expecting more than the next emergency. And this is what forever more steals.
Leslie Poston:Not only our lives, though, of course, it steals those, and not only our homes, hospitals, ecosystems, and public trust, although it destroys those too. It steals the future. It steals the human ability to live toward what hasn't happened yet. Once you see that, it becomes harder to accept forever war as background noise. Because what it's really doing is training whole populations to expect less from life from one another and less from the future itself.
Leslie Poston:It's in our power to stop that together. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. As always, until next time, stay curious, and look out for your fellow human beings. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a week, and send this to a friend if you think that this might help them.
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