On Pointless Wars

My grandmother — dearly loved, gone for a long time now — once told me how a friend of hers fell for an old scam: someone called to say her grandson had been in a car crash, and she needed to hand over cash, fast, “to make the problem go away.” Grandma snorted. “What a fool! They even warned about that one on TV,” she said, with kind irony.

Two weeks later. A call from her. I pick up — there are tears in her voice:
— “Diiima, are you all right?!”
— “Yes. Did something happen?”
— “Oh… I just handed over twenty-five thousand. They told me you’d been in an accident…”

The rest you can guess. She refused to take the money back — said it was her own fault, her own responsibility. And me… I decided to take revenge. Who dared touch her? What kind of moral degenerate?

I called a friend — influential, experienced. “Let it go. You won’t win this war. You’ll burn your strength, your nerves, your time. And all for nothing,” he said. But inside, everything was boiling. Not only from the injustice, but from the helplessness. From being unable to change a single thing.

In time I understood: there are wars that objectively cannot be won. Or they can — but not here, and not now. Or the price of victory is simply too high: strength, time, nerves, focus, the meaning of your life — all of it pulled down into that whirlpool of revenge. And in that same time, we could have been doing something that truly matters.

There’s an old line: “If you set out for revenge, dig two graves.”

This isn’t only about fraud. It can be:
— a debt that will never be repaid;
— a promise that won’t be kept;
— a situation where even the court can’t help, because the law is powerless;
— a deal that fell apart from bureaucracy, a run of bad luck, or the interference of larger, stronger systems.

Sometimes a person genuinely didn’t mean to let you down, but couldn’t cope — with reality, with himself, with the task. Failures happen. And we spend months and years to “punish,” to “prove,” to “force it through”…

I’ve seen dozens of people pour their energy into lawsuits against bankrupt companies with nothing left to take. Or filing police reports on cases that have no chance. Someone once suggested I bring a case against the founder of a startup that didn’t take off.
— “When you invested, didn’t you know it was venture? That the odds of losing the money were far higher than making it?”
— Silence.

I’m not telling anyone to make peace with injustice. There are times when it really is worth going all the way! But I’m for pragmatism and cold calculation. Sometimes the best decision is simply to move on and build something big, alive, real. And, as experience shows, the world has its own way of putting everything back in its place. Just not while we’re fixated on it. And almost never in the way we’d have wanted.

And the most important thing: a battle where our ego wants to prove something to someone is lost before it begins. Because there’s no other side there. There’s only our own pain, our hurt, our fear of looking weak.

Here’s to all of us choosing our battles carefully. And better the ones where there’s a chance to build something — not just to burn it down! 😎