Nobody Seems to Want to Be at War

I’ve been in Asia for a few months now. India. Vietnam. Meeting people from all over along the way. And before I left, I think I had this vague sense that meeting someone from Russia or China would feel… tense? Not because of anything that had actually happened to me. Just because of everything I’d absorbed. Years of news. Years of “adversary” and “threat” and “enemy.”

Then I actually sat across from these people. And that tension I expected? It just wasn’t there.

The Story We Get Told

Being American, you grow up with a specific lens on this stuff. We hear about our wars. We hear about our enemies — or the people they say are our enemies. Russia. China. The framing is pretty consistent.

What’s wild is that India has its own conflicts going on, and I barely knew about them before I went there. The world is full of tensions that don’t even make our news cycle because they don’t fit the story we’re being sold. What we get instead is a curated version — one that reinforces a very specific picture of who’s dangerous.

I’m not saying geopolitical tensions aren’t real. They are. But there’s a difference between governments posturing and people living their lives. And I’m finding that difference is something you can only really understand when you leave the bubble and go talk to actual human beings.

The People I’ve Actually Sat With

Here’s what I’ve seen in the last few months:

The Russians I’ve met think what’s happening is crazy. They don’t want war. Some of them left specifically because they didn’t want to get drafted. They’re not ideologues. They’re people in their twenties and thirties who want to build careers and travel and not die in a conflict they didn’t choose.

The Ukrainians I’ve met have been displaced. Lost homes. Lost routines. In some cases, lost people. They’re devastated. They’re not abstract statistics in a news segment — they’re sitting in coffee shops in Southeast Asia trying to figure out what comes next.

The Chinese people I’ve met were some of the kindest I’ve encountered anywhere. Open, curious, generous. Not a single moment of the hostility or suspicion the news might lead you to expect.

People from Belarus. People from Vietnam — a country the US was at war with within living memory. Every single one of them wanted the same thing: to be safe, to take care of their families, and to live in a world that isn’t constantly on the edge of something terrible.

The Disconnect

Here’s what gets me. Every real person I’ve met wants coexistence and peace. Every one. They’re worried about the state of the world, same as I am. They want their kids to be okay. They want to make a living. They want to not be afraid.

But the narrative coming through the news is adversarial. It’s built on opposition. Us versus them. Allies versus enemies. It frames the world like a chessboard where entire populations are just pieces being moved around.

This disconnect between what I’ve experienced firsthand and what I see on screens is one of the largest I’ve ever encountered. It’s not a small gap. It’s a canyon. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I’m not naive about this. Governments have interests that diverge. There are real conflicts with real consequences. The world is complicated. But the people caught in the middle of those conflicts — on every side — overwhelmingly do not want to be there.

What This Has to Do With Building Things

You might be wondering what this has to do with tech or business or anything I normally talk about. Here’s where it connects for me.

If you’re running a company or leading a team in current times, your world is global whether you planned for it or not. Your developers might be in Eastern Europe. Your customers might be in Asia. The person on the other side of a contract or a Zoom call could be from anywhere.

The lens you use to see the world affects the decisions you make. If you’re operating from a fear-based narrative — where entire countries get reduced to “enemy” or “threat” — I think you make worse decisions. You avoid partnerships that could’ve been great. You overlook talent because of where someone was born. You build walls in your business that mirror the walls being built in politics.

But if you operate from what’s actually true — that people everywhere are overwhelmingly decent, that they want to collaborate, that they share your concerns about family and livelihood and safety — you build better. You hire better. You solve problems with people you wouldn’t have found otherwise. That’s a real competitive advantage, and it comes from seeing clearly instead of seeing through someone else’s filter.

The best engineering decisions I’ve made have always come from getting closer to reality, not further from it. I’m finding the same thing applies to how I see the world.

Where I’m Landing

Travel has a way of collapsing the distance between “us” and “them.” Not because it’s romantic or idealistic — but because it forces you to reconcile what you’ve been told with what you can see with your own eyes.

Nobody I’ve met wants to be at war. Not the Russians, not the Ukrainians, not the Chinese, not the Vietnamese, not the Belarusians. They want what I want. Safety. Stability. A future that isn’t defined by someone else’s conflict.

The news will keep painting its adversarial picture. That’s what it does.

But I’ve been thinking about this question, and I don’t have a clean answer: how much of what I believe about “the other side” — in geopolitics, in business, in my industry — is based on something I’ve actually experienced? And how much of it is a narrative someone else built for me?

I’m still sitting with that one.