The Inner Monologue

There’s a moment—somewhere between the latest invasion, the newest sanctions, and the twelfth emergency summit in a single month—when you realize that geopolitics has become less “game of chess” and more “children fighting over a crayon box during nap time.” The stakes are high, the rhetoric is grand, and yet the whole performance feels weirdly hollow, like watching an opera about global annihilation sung entirely by hand puppets.

That’s usually when someone on the news, usually wearing an expensive tie and a worried expression, tells you that this is the most consequential moment in modern history. Of course, they said that last month, too. And the month before that. And the month before that one. At some point, a reasonable person might begin to suspect that all of this mattering is a little bit performative.

Enter nihilism—not as a moral collapse, but as a survival strategy.

Let’s be clear: I’m not suggesting we all start wearing black turtlenecks, quoting Nietzsche, and sighing dramatically into the void. True nihilism isn’t despair—it’s liberation. It’s the mental health version of pulling the plug on a broken appliance that’s been sparking for years. Because let’s face it, global politics have become a theater of futility: everyone performing, no one believing, and the audience trapped inside, clutching their popcorn, wondering when the exits will open.

We’ve been told since childhood that caring is virtuous. Civic engagement, voting, advocacy—all noble, all essential. But what happens when the system you’re supposed to believe in starts to look like a parody of itself? When international diplomacy looks more like an influencer collaboration gone wrong? When the “rules-based order” is less about order and more about whoever happens to be writing the rules that week?

At some point, you start to think that maybe the problem isn’t apathy—it’s the illusion of meaning.

Because let’s be honest: the people at the top aren’t playing by the same emotional rules as the rest of us. They aren’t losing sleep over inflation, or the next conscription, or whether their kid will ever own a home. Their nightmares are about market confidence and dinner seating charts at Davos. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left arguing online about which superpower is slightly less evil—as if morality can be measured by GDP or the number of drones per capita.

This is where nihilism, properly applied, becomes a kind of clarity. It doesn’t tell you to stop caring entirely. It just invites you to stop pretending that your care alone can fix the machine. It whispers: maybe the world has always been absurd, and maybe that’s okay.

Imagine, for a moment, that you stop trying to assign moral hierarchy to a world order that functions like a perpetual motion machine of self-interest. Imagine, instead, that you treat geopolitics the way you’d treat a soap opera—dramatic, overacted, yet somehow comforting in its predictability. Someone is betrayed, someone is outraged, someone declares a new era of peace that lasts roughly three weeks. Rinse, repeat, commercial break.

When viewed through a nihilistic lens, the endless headlines about “existential threats to democracy” start to sound less like prophecy and more like programming notes. You stop waiting for the world to become rational and start appreciating the craftsmanship of the chaos. You stop asking why the world is burning and start asking who picked the playlist.

Now, of course, the devoutly hopeful will accuse nihilists of being irresponsible. “If everyone thought like that,” they’ll warn, “nothing would ever change!” To which the nihilist might reasonably reply: “Show me the evidence that things have changed so far.” The world has been teetering on the brink of doom for so long that “brink of doom” might as well be a time zone.

In a world where nuclear treaties expire faster than milk and “peacekeeping” means “sending more weapons,” it’s not cynicism to disengage—it’s self-defense. It’s choosing sanity over ceremony.

And yet nihilism doesn’t mean you stop participating in life. Quite the opposite. It gives you permission to live without pretending the scoreboard matters. You can still plant a garden, still love your family, still volunteer, still chase sunsets. You just stop believing that the fate of the human race depends on which man in a suit scowls harder at the G20.

The secret beauty of nihilism is that it doesn’t end in nothingness—it ends in freedom. Once you stop expecting history to have a happy ending, you start noticing how beautiful the middle can be. You start laughing more. You start listening instead of preaching. You start realizing that every great civilization thought the world was ending right before someone else built a better one on top of the ashes.

If the current world order collapses—and let’s be honest, it’s at least limping—it won’t be because we stopped caring. It’ll be because the machinery was never designed for empathy in the first place. The great geopolitical experiment has always been a theater of self-interest masquerading as moral purpose. Nihilism just hands you a flashlight so you can see the stagehands behind the curtain.

So yes, maybe when geopolitics go to hell, nihilism isn’t such a bad idea. It’s not surrender—it’s a smirk in the face of absurdity. It’s choosing to play your own tune while the orchestra catches fire.

Because in the end, whether the world ends with a bang or a bureaucratic whimper, it will do so without asking our permission. The least we can do is laugh at the spectacle, pour another drink, and remind ourselves that meaning—like peace treaties—is usually temporary, and that’s perfectly fine.

After all, if geopolitics insists on being a tragic farce, we might as well enjoy the irony of the encore.