War is expensive. And you're paying for it.
Not with a rifle in your hands or a helmet on your head. You're paying at the gas pump, in the glow of your electricity meter, in the slow erosion of public services that once felt like a given. Every conflict reported as a "distant affair" — with bombs falling on cities whose names most Europeans can't pronounce — sends shockwaves through the global economy that land, with surgical precision, on your doorstep.
I've spent my life in a wheelchair. I know what it means to fight battles that feel invisible to the rest of the world. But this particular fight — the fight against the normalisation of war's economic violence — is one we all share, whether we realise it or not.
The Siren That Never Sounds
There's a line that stopped me cold when I read it: "War enters our homes, and there is no siren to warn us" .
Think about that for a second. Sirens exist to tell you danger is close. They give you a chance to react, to protect yourself, to run. But the economic devastation of war creeps in silently — through a 30% spike in European gas prices, through oil climbing back above $80 a barrel, through stock market tremors that ripple outward like aftershocks from an earthquake you never felt .
The Strait of Hormuz — a narrow waterway most people have never heard of — carries roughly 20% of the world's oil supply . When conflict threatens to choke that passage, the entire global energy market convulses. And the pain doesn't stay in the Persian Gulf. It travels at the speed of commodity trading, arriving in your utility bill before the news anchors have finished explaining what happened.
European Central Bank economists aren't mincing words: a prolonged conflict risks reigniting inflation and stalling growth . For those of us in southern Europe — I'm writing from Tirana, where economic fragility isn't an abstract concept — this isn't a forecast. It's a threat.
The Budget You Never Voted For
Here's the part that makes my blood boil.
Every military escalation devours public resources. Money flows into the defence industry like water through a broken pipe, while healthcare, education, and welfare are left gasping for air with tighter and tighter budgets . I've needed healthcare systems my entire life. I've depended on the kind of social infrastructure that gets quietly defunded every time a government decides that missiles matter more than medicine.
The promise is always the same: more weapons for greater security . It's a seductive equation. Simple. Clean. And historically, catastrophically wrong.
History — which, as the source text dryly notes, "few people study" — tells a different story . Rearmament spirals don't prevent conflict. They produce it. The arms race of the early 20th century didn't stop World War I; it guaranteed it. We know this. We teach it in schools (the ones we're still funding, anyway). And yet we keep repeating the pattern, as though this time the math will somehow work out differently.
Educated Into Acceptance
What disturbs me most isn't the economics. It's the psychology.
Public opinion is being trained to accept the cost of war as inevitable — almost natural, like weather . "That's just how geopolitics works," we're told. Some people decide, and others pay. This framing isn't accidental. It's a narrative designed to make you shrug, scroll past the headline, and absorb the next price hike without asking who benefits.
But let me be direct: this war isn't only being fought in the Persian Gulf. It's being fought in our economies, in our political priorities, in the way governments choose where to allocate resources . Every missile launched thousands of miles away also arrives — transformed, disguised — as inflation, as reduced social rights, as a hospital ward that closes because the budget went somewhere else .
I run FreeAstroScience, a science and cultural group with tens of thousands of followers. I've dedicated my career to the idea that science and education are tools for human development. Not weapons. Not leverage. Tools for building something better. And every euro redirected from research to rearmament feels like a personal betrayal of that mission.
The Bills Always Arrive
Let me simplify a complex geopolitical reality for you, because that's what I do — I take complicated things and make them human-sized.
War is a wealth transfer. It moves money from your pocket to the defence sector. It moves political attention from your needs to strategic calculations made in rooms you'll never enter. It moves risk from the powerful to the vulnerable. And it does all of this while telling you it's for your own protection.
"War remains distant as long as someone tells us it is. Then the bills arrive. And those, punctually, always arrive at our doorstep" .
I don't have a neat solution to offer. I'm a physicist in a wheelchair, not a diplomat. But I know this: the first step toward peace is refusing to accept war's costs as normal. Refusing the shrug. Refusing the narrative that says this is just how things are.
What I Want — And What I Think You Want Too
I want peace. Not the naive, poster-on-a-wall kind (though I wouldn't mind that either). I want the practical kind — the kind where governments invest in education instead of ammunition, where energy policy isn't held hostage by military strategy, where a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz doesn't determine whether a family in Bologna or Tirana can afford to heat their home this winter.
Is that too much to ask? Honestly, I don't think so.
The philosophy I've lived by — through surgeries, through disability, through every obstacle life has thrown at me — is simple: never give up. And I refuse to give up on the idea that human beings can choose cooperation over destruction, that we can look at a defence budget and ask, "What if we spent this on something that actually makes people's lives better?"
The bills will keep arriving. The question is whether we keep paying them in silence — or whether we finally, loudly, demand a different invoice.
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