Something strange happens during wars. At the beginning, the world gasps. People pause. Headlines shock us. But then, slowly, something else happens. The absurd becomes ordinary. The first images disturb us deeply. A building collapsing. A child crying. Smoke rising over a city. We stare at the screen longer than usual. We feel something heavy inside.

However, a few weeks later, the same images appear again. And again. And again. Eventually, the human mind does something strange. It adapts. What once feels intolerable begins to feel familiar. Violence slowly turns into background noise. Scholars term it as the normalization of violence, where repeated exposure gradually makes spectacular brutality seem routine.

This is how the absurd silently creeps into everyday life. A missile strike becomes a news update. A destroyed street becomes a video clip. Human suffering becomes a statistic. We scroll past it during our convenient time.

Psychologists observe that nonstop exposure to violent content changes how people perceive reality, making the world appear to them as eternally dreadful and disorderly. But something deeper also happens. We become numb. Not because we are cruel. Because we are human.

The mind protects itself. When pain repeats too often, it slowly builds emotional distance. It reduces shock. It lowers the volume of empathy just enough to allow daily life to continue. Otherwise, we could not function properly.

Imagine waking every day, fully absorbing every tragedy on the planet. The human heart would collapse under the weight. So the mind adjusts. Wars continue. And the world learns to carry on around it.

Flights still take off. Markets still open. People still argue about traffic and weather. This contrast is perhaps the strangest feature of modern conflicts. Catastrophe can unfold somewhere while normal life continues somewhere else. Two realities coexist. One filled with sirens. Another filled with coffee shops.

Technology has intensified this paradox. A person can watch a missile strike in one corner of the screen while messages arrive from friends planning an iftar party in another. The extraordinary and the ordinary now share the same digital space. But the normalization of absurdity does not only happen in the mind. It also happens in language.

Listen carefully to how wars are discussed. Words become softer. “Collateral damage.” “Precision strikes.” “Strategic response.” These phrases try to organize chaos into tidy explanations. Language becomes a cushion between reality and conscience.

It helps societies process what would otherwise be unbearable. Yet sometimes these words hide something important. War is never tidy. Behind every technical phrase are human lives interrupted. Souls lost. Families separated. Homes abandoned. Futures postponed.

Still, the world keeps moving. That is the paradox of humanity. We are capable of both great compassion and peculiar detachment simultaneously. Somewhere, volunteers collect donations for strangers miles away. And elsewhere, people debate the conflict as if it were a chess game.

Any event can inspire empathy, anger, fatigue or indifference, depending on who is watching. Media scholars often note that repeated exposure to conflict imagery gradually reshapes what audiences perceive as “normal,” subtly shifting emotional responses over time.

This is not necessarily a moral failure. It is survival. Humans have lived through wars for centuries. If each generation had remained permanently paralyzed by shock, societies would never rebuild. The ability to normalize the absurd has helped humanity endure.

But it also carries a danger. When the extraordinary becomes routine, we risk losing the ability to question it. The abnormal begins to feel inevitable. Explosions become headlines. Headlines become updates. Updates become silence.

Yet somewhere, someone still reacts differently. A child watching the news asks a simple question. “Why are they fighting?” Children often notice what adults stop noticing. The absurd. They see clearly what the rest of us slowly accept. That something deeply unnatural is happening.

Perhaps that question is important. Not because it will stop wars overnight. But because it interrupts the normalisation. It reminds us that beneath the statistics and strategies are human beings whose lives are not meant to be reduced to breaking-news alerts.

So, the greatest danger of wars may not only be destruction. It may be the hushed moment when the world stops being shocked by it—that moment, when the absurd finally feels normal.

© Greater Kashmir