It's actually even simpler than that.

The world, and life itself, is complicated and messy in 2026, and an awareness of it and the constant, always on vigilance of keeping up with all of the moral responsibility of trying to build a life that allows you to look yourself in the mirror every day in a world built to usher everyone into maintaining exploitative systems is draining and crushing.

If you don't have to do that because you're either ignorant of the machinery you're part of, or don't care, you just get to go about your life.

e: I misread your original post, I thought you were saying that both sides in the war were shitbags. I still think it's too simple of an explanation in general, though. Such circumstances deserve a deeper look.

My point is that, even if the meme is true and woke people tend to be sadder than reactionaries, it's because they aren't woke enough. For instance, you have generally well-intentioned progressive liberals who support equal rights and oppressed people at home, i.e. they support gay and transgender people against social reactionaries, but when they see Iran and its religious and socially conservative allies actually striking hard at the fascist empire, actually turning the tide back, and rather than being happy about it they just see it as two equal evils fighting each other. They don't see the broader situation and context - they're woke to discrimination, but they aren't woke to imperialism.

For the last 600 years, the world has been dominated by European empires. These empires enriched themselves through their colonies, using that wealth to grow ever more powerful and take over a greater and greater proportion of the world, eventually overcoming and dominating their former equals in India and China.

World War I was fought to divide up the world between blocs of these empires, with the Anglo-French-American bloc triumphing and taking the holdings of Germany and the old Ottoman empire (a relic of the previous era), and breaking up Austria-Hungary. But this arrangement was not stable - Germany wasn't down for the count, and more importantly, the old European empires were declining while America was rising.

This was settled into a more stable system with the end of WW2 and the decolonization that followed, but this decolonization was only giving way to a new kind of imperialism - that of finance, currency manipulation, loans with conditions that made extraction easier. Soft power, in other words, with the occasional bout of violent domination. But the violent domination wasn't official conquest - rather, new and more amenable governments were installed, enabling the continued expropriation of labour and resources from the colonized countries. Thus, the new empire, formed from the old European empires but headed by America, came to dominate the world from World War 2 until today.

Social progress tends to follow from economic progress. The women's rights movement was born out of women entering the workplace. The gay rights movement emerged in the post-war period of prosperity. The colonized countries of the global south did not have these same prosperity, and social progress came to them later than in the imperial core. At the same time, aspects of social progress often came to seen as aspects of colonialism and foreign domination, clashing with traditional culture. Indeed, the imperial core uses socially regressive attitudes and policies in the colonized world to justify our domination over them. Just look at the war with Iran (the repressive mullah regime that executes gays and makes women wear veils) for an example. They aren't as developed as us, and therefore we must crush and dominate them, and seize their natural resources for private capital. Thus, a lack of social progress in the global south (or third world, or whatever you want to call it) creates the justification for imperial domination, while imperial domination creates the conditions that hinder progress.

The victory of the colonized and the overthrow of the imperial yoke will create the conditions that foster social progress. It's a precondition, so interpreting the socially conservative Iranian state resisting the American empire as "one evil fighting another" is wrong-headed. It's historically progressive. The victory of Iran will be a victory for the world, which will help move history forth into a new post-imperial era. 600 years of this, over half a millennia, and it's finally coming to a close. There is therefore every reason to hope and little reason to despair. Woke liberals do not see this, because they are not woke enough.