Buying Curtains Under Fire: Why Small Domestic Acts Are Not 'Resilience' But Resistance to War's Control
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/diana-berg. "I went curtain shopping during a Kyiv air raid. And not because I’m ‘resilient’ | Diana Berg | The Guardian." October 2, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
The author argues that buying curtains during a drone attack isn't about being brave or 'resilient'—it's simply a human need to hold onto small normal moments of life even when everything rational says you should expect to lose it all tomorrow. She says people under constant threat of war don't calculate risk perfectly; instead they keep buying books, adopting cats, and decorating homes because refusing to let the war control every choice is how they stay psychologically intact.
Conclusion
Engaging in small domestic acts of normalcy (buying curtains, books, plants) during war is not an act of noble 'resilience' but a rational psychological refusal to let war dictate every decision, even though it coexists with an awareness that rational wartime logic would dictate owning and attaching to less.
Premises
- The author continued trying to buy curtains despite walking into an active drone attack, demonstrating that mundane desires persist even amid mortal danger.
- She and her husband avoid major investments (flooring, renovations) because a missile could destroy them tomorrow, showing they understand the 'rational' logic of owning less.
- Despite this, small acquisitions keep accumulating over time (books, plants, cats, a new television, piano, monitor), showing a pattern that contradicts pure survival-minimized logic.
- Having fled home twice with only what they could carry, the author and her husband are acutely aware of the true cost of attachment, yet continue to form new attachments anyway.
- A nearby acquaintance was killed by a strike on a building she and her husband had just invested in and renovated, illustrating the real risk of attachment to material life during war, yet this doesn't stop the pattern of attachment.
- The word 'resilience' misrepresents this behavior as virtuous when it actually feels more like an involuntary refusal to cede total psychological control to the war.
- Daily life continues alongside danger (barbecues during air raids, writing from a bathtub during a bombing) showing that the coexistence of mundane life and existential threat is the ordinary condition of wartime living, not a special act of courage.
Assumptions
- Humans have a psychological need to anchor themselves in normalcy and the present moment, even under existential threat.
- The term 'resilience' as commonly used implies deliberate virtue or strength, which the author believes mischaracterizes an instinctive, perhaps involuntary, human coping behavior.
- Purely rational risk-calculation (owning/needing less) is psychologically unsustainable or undesirable even when materially sound.
- Acts of domestic normalization (curtains, plants, pets) serve an emotional function distinct from their practical utility.
- The reader will accept the author's firsthand wartime experience as representative of a broader psychological truth about how people cope with war.