We Are Addicted to Conflict

We Are Addicted to Conflict

For a while now, I’ve been experiencing significant peace throughout much of each day. Even as deadlines swirl around me and terrible things happen around the world. It’s been pretty great.

Then I think about an eternity’s worth of this peace. And a crazy thought comes into my head sometimes: “How boring.”

That’s the strange downside to peace – no drama. No emotional highs and lows. No mental roller coaster rides. No Indiana Jones-style adventures. Just a steady stream of calm joy.

The fact is, humans just aren’t used to peace. And I’m not just referring to the wars raging across our globe. We have become so conditioned to believe that conflict is our normal state that we can’t imagine life without it. It seems like life—and eternity—would just be so uneventful otherwise. Like a bad movie whose screenwriter didn’t understand the need for rising action, where the conflict and drama build to the central crisis, whose outcome will determine whether the hero wins or loses. Those movies are hard to watch; it feels like “nothing” happened and we wasted our time. Because we are conditioned to need conflict.

We all, in the core of our beings, want peace. We catch glimpses of it, we seek it out from time to time, and it feels wonderful. We are certain it can’t last, so we cherish it before it flits away. The reason that it flies away repeatedly, if we ever had it at all, is because we don’t live from that core that recognized its true and intended state. We live from our minds.

The mind is the architect of the personality, and the personality is built on the false assumption of lack and wrongness. Something is missing; something is wrong. Be on your guard. Here’s how to get what you need/want. Here’s how to be acceptable to the world. This is fundamentally how the personality operates.

This is why we are addicted to conflict. It’s because we are addicted to our minds – or, more specifically, to our personality. The personality cannot exist in the absence of conflict – which is why I contend that there will be no personality in heaven. There would be nothing for it to do. Nothing to defend against. Nothing to fight for.

This is actually why story exists, especially hero stories. They are the mind’s way of providing roadmaps through the conflict it sees as inevitable. It is trying to help us navigate the world, to survive these conflicts. But I am beginning to distrust these stories—even though I used to write them—because I see that most of them are just the personality’s patterns of fear projected onto a book’s pages or a screen. I’m not very entertained by these faulty perceptions of reality anymore.

The personality fights hard against peace, a thing it cannot understand and therefore cannot trust. As I create distance between my authentic self and my personality, I seek peace and dwell in it more often. I recommend that you do the same. Peace is, after all, your birthright as a child of God. Learn the Enneagram, understand your Type and begin to break free from the personality addiction that chains you to conflict.

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