Conflict is unavoidable - let's talk about why that is
- Mar 26
- 4 min read
Here's a fun game. Try to think of a topic that isn't politically charged right now.
Take a moment.
If that took more effort than you expected, you’re not alone. The list of topics that can ignite a dinner table (or a comment section) keeps growing, and it's not slowing down. It used to be that you could mostly avoid the minefield if you steered clear of foreign policy, abortion, and gas prices. Now the minefield is the dinner table.
But let's not put this all on politics, because the truth is, conflict follows us to work too.
One in four people experience workplace conflict that escalates into personal attacks. This number gets bigger in more stressful work settings. Nine out of ten nurses report experiencing verbal abuse in the time span of a month — and before you picture an unhinged patient fresh off a binge of The Pitt, most of the time it's coming from the physicians.
Whether you're sitting at your desk or your dining room table, conflict has a way of finding you.
Conflict isn't just something that happens to you. It's a system you live inside.
Author Amanda Ripley calls out fire starters — parts of that big messy system that intentionally stoke rival identities to keep the flames burning. Things like the media ecosystem where negative posts travel further than positive ones because the algorithm is essentially a rage-baiting machine. And then there are false binaries, where complex ideas are simplified into just two options when in reality there are a spectrum of different perspectives. These can be hard to recognize because it isn’t always a “pro” and an “anti” option. Quite often we see opposing “pro” options we’re asked to choose between.
The thing is, most of us don't actually live squarely in one camp or the other. More of us live somewhere in the middle. Our actual point of view is closer to "it depends." But "it depends" doesn't get clicks. So the loudest, most extreme versions of every debate get amplified, and the rest of us absorb them, and start to believe the divide is wider than it actually is.
Then there's the role our own opinions play in all of this.
Here's something a little uncomfortable: a lot of the opinions we hold most confidently are ones we inherited rather than chose. We absorbed them from our families, our communities, our feeds. Many of them are what you might call half-baked — good enough to repeat at a dinner party, but not fully thought through, never seriously stress-tested or wrestled with.
And when someone challenges one of those opinions? Our instinct isn't to examine it. It's to defend it. We assume the person pushing back isn't just wrong about the issue — they're wrong because there’s something wrong with them. Behavioral scientists call this the Fundamental Attribution Error, and as we've talked about before, it shows up in 100% of studies testing for it. We're all doing this, all the time, without realizing it.
So why don't we just talk it out?
Because we value peace. And that's actually a good instinct. There is real wisdom in picking your battles. Not every hill is worth dying on, and reading the room — noticing that your partner is already maxed out from a rough day before you bring up the thing that's been bothering you — is a sign of emotional intelligence, not cowardice.
The problem is when "picking your battles" quietly becomes "never having the battle."
When we mistake chronic avoidance for harmony.
Never disagreeing is a sign of dishonesty, or a lack of critical thinking as Adam Grant says. A relationship — or a workplace, or a family — where nobody ever pushes back isn't peaceful. It's a mirage. And just like a mirage, it can look nice but we tend to seek something more substantive.
And here's the part we don't talk about enough: when you're the one holding back, you're the one absorbing the conflict. You're carrying the discomfort, the stress, and the slow burn of regret on behalf of everyone else in the room. The conflict doesn't disappear when you swallow it. It just lives in you now.
When we do this for long enough we can snap. It might not be as dramatic as Milton’s revenge on Initech in Office Space. But we’ve all been caught off guard on a bad day and lost our cool. The conflict builds up inside us and we lose control.
We avoid conflict simply because we don't know what else to do.
We don't have the tools. We know that doing nothing doesn't feel great, but at least it's familiar. Saying something feels like stepping into the unknown with no map and a high probability of making things worse.
Here's a reframe that might help: find your inner kindergartener.
Psychologist Eileen Kennedy-Moore reminds us that preschool and early elementary kids average just under three conflicts an hour. Three! And then they go back to playing. They don't stew. They don't draft the perfect response in their heads for two weeks. They surface the thing, work through it imperfectly, and move on.
We were all kindergarteners once. We knew how to do this before we learned to be afraid of it. As James Baldwin wrote,
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Conflict isn't the enemy of good relationships. Avoidance is. The goal isn't a life without conflict — it's building enough skill and enough trust that conflict doesn't have to be the end of the story.
Better conversations are possible. But first, you have to be willing to have them.
Comments