Modern Life Is Attrition Warfare

Recently, someone asked me why I am so quick to block people on Twitter. And it’s true, I’ve blocked more than 10,000 accounts, mostly for insults in the replies. The answer has nothing to do with social etiquette and everything to do with a fundamental principle of human nature.

A single insult doesn't break you but a constant stream of it does. One rude comment disappears. A thousand insults a day eventually rewire your nervous system. Trivial provocations designed to keep you engaged and depleted. I block accounts the way you'd close a wound. It's self-preservation. I refuse to participate in my own demolition. It’s important when you curate your social media you aren’t getting depleted, it should be giving you energy not take it away.

It’s the principle of attrition. It’s important in so many other domains.

The economic version of this friction is the small, thoughtless purchase, the delivery fee, the premium coffee, the upgraded sandwich. These are the financial equivalent of a thousand annoying Twitter replies, each one insignificant on its own, but devastating in aggregate. Something as simple as pizza now costs way more than you think these days.

@pilotpete.fly

Criminal 🍕#nyc #food #pizza

If you’re not careful, it becomes a trap. Take a look at delivery apps. They are marketed as convenience for the busy professional but in reality those can least afford it engage with it the most. The lowest income Americans order the most delivery. The added fees, taxes, and tips on a single meal create a debilitating financial friction. It’s a convenience that hollows you out in the end. You can’t really save money if you’re constantly doing this on low wages.

Attrition is the condition of the world we live in. Everything costs more than it should, but not big expensive purchases which are easy to avoid, the small, daily purchases that define our lives.

@kiarakacvinsky

how much I spent on a random day in la!! disclaimer: I am on vacation and wanted to treat myself to food & experiences this isn’t what my ... See more

Taking dating for example. People hate online dating. They get worn out doing it. It’s because dating apps turn rejection into a daily routine. You swipe through thousands of faces. You message dozens of people who vanish. You meet strangers for first dates that go nowhere. Someone ghosts you. You ghost someone. Repeat. What used to be occasional disappointment of asking someone out in public is now permanent low-grade demoralization.

Modern life is attrition warfare. This explains the paradox of why we're the most comfortable generation in history but also maintain the most low-grade misery. Every convenience comes with small bits of extraction built in. Every comfort has attrition baked into the model. We're suffering because of how the abundance is delivered.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Part of this is just how we are wired. We evolved to spot the lion, our stress-response system, known as fight-or-flight, is tuned for short, sharp emergencies. As Robert Sapolsky has outlined, this system is brilliant for helping a zebra escape a predator, but it was never meant to be activated by a thousand daily provocations. Sapolsky showed that chronic stress actually shrinks the hippocampus, impairs memory, weakens the immune system. The thousand cuts aren't just psychological, they're physiological.

Now we live inside systems designed to exploit this exact blindspot. The extraction stays below the threshold of alarm. Each increment is small enough to tolerate. Frequent enough to seem normal. Distributed enough that you can't identify a single enemy. But it builds up over time.

Our ancestors may not have had a scientific term for it, but they understood the principle intimately. Languages are littered with folk proverb about attrition: “death by a thousand cuts,” “nickeled and dimed,” “the grind.”

Two thousand years ago, Lucretius captured it:

A single drop leaves almost no mark. Two thousand drops carve a crater. This is how water defeats stone.

It’s difficult to notice the day-to-day change. Work can change you. When you enter a career you may think in certain ways, but 20 years later your thoughts are different.

Work changes you slowly. Each time you suppress a spontaneous joke or bite back an observation, a part of you dulls. Twenty years later, you’re different, not by decision, but erosion, your impulse changes.

What is true for the individual psyche is also true for the body politic. War is not won by the spectacular, but by the sustained.

On War and Attrition

Wars don't end the way we imagine them.

The textbooks give us Waterloo and D-Day. Hollywood gives us the climactic battle. We expect a turning point, a moment when everything shifts. But the 19th-century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, the West’s premier philosopher of war, wrote the core of strategy is "the gradual exhaustion of the physical powers and of the will." The true objective is to break the enemy's spirit, not just their front lines.

This exhaustion is the essence of attrition. The British military historian B.H. Liddell Hart later argued that the focus on the "decisive battle" is a dangerous oversimplification. He noted that even the most spectacular victories are usually the culmination of a longer process where the loser was already weakened. The real work of war is the "gradual erosion" of the enemy's foundation.

The Eastern Front proved this completely. Germany invaded the Soviet Union with superior tactics, better-trained officers, and early devastating victories. They won most of the battles. But the USSR had something else, the capacity to absorb catastrophic losses and keep producing tanks, shells, and soldiers. Germany couldn't win a war of industrial endurance. By 1943, the Wehrmacht was being ground down not by brilliant Soviet maneuvers but by relentless pressure across a thousand-mile front. The factories in the Urals kept running. The Red Army kept coming. Germany bled out.

@vitaminrc

Did you know that the Soviet Union lost up to 26 Million, 1/7 of its population in WW2? #roycasagranda #ww2 #knowledge #russia #germany #u... See more

Even today we are seeing it.

Ukraine shed its mobile phase early. Now it's trenches and drones. The front line doesn't move through sweeping armored columns. It moves through the steady erosion of artillery shells, missiles, manpower. It's logistics and stamina. Whose factories can produce more shells. Whose allies will exhaust first. Whose soldiers can endure the relentless pressure longest. Victory will go to whoever can withstand the slow drip of destruction for one day longer.

Make Your Life Better Through Attrition

To see attrition only as a destructive force is to see only half the universe. The ancients, who understood the patience of water on stone, recognized this same principle as the engine of happiness, relationships, and living the good life.

Attrition isn't just something that happens to you. It's a force you can measure, manage, and deploy. Here's how to track the drip before it empties you out, and how to point it toward your goals.

Enter Epicurus

Around 306 BC, in Athens, the philosopher Epicurus established "The Garden," a school dedicated to a single purpose. Achieving ataraxia, a state of untroubled tranquility, the relative absence of physical and mental pain.

Friendship, wisdom, moderation, these weren't the goals themselves, but the means to achieve this freedom from disturbance. He understood that happiness is not a grand destination to be reached, but a condition built by systematically eliminating the sources of misery. His entire philosophy was a deliberate, strategic application of positive attrition.

Let’s see how he did that

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