Get ready for price shocks because of Iran? How are we supposed to do that? | Zoe Williams

. UK edition

A Shell petrol fuel price standard at a Shell petrol station with a fuel stand to right and traffic to the left
Fuel prices at a petrol station in east London, on Monday 9 March. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

From energy to food, all of life’s essentials are about to get even more expensive. But just knowing that won’t pay the bills, writes Zoe Williams

As soon as the attacks on Iran started, the warnings commenced: “Get ready for price shocks. Get ready for the oil price to spike. Oh, no need to get ready – it’s already hit $100 a barrel. Get ready for Russia to claw some circuitous but massive advantage from the fact that everything is on fire, get ready for energy bills to go up.” By about day five, experts were explaining how to lock in your current tariff except, whoops, given the global instability, those tariffs were no longer available. If it felt mercenary to worry about your unit price as people were dying, that’s because it was; but considerations of human decency and proportionality aren’t going to arrest the trajectory of life getting more expensive.

Get ready for everything to feed into everything else: rising petrol prices to lead to food inflation, food inflation to lead to stuff inflation. Get ready for wages to be unequal to the cost of living, get ready not to complain about it because you’re lucky to have a wage. Get ready for stock exchanges to crash, get ready to not be entirely sure what scale of economic disaster you’re looking at.

While the causal relationship between all these things is perfectly clear, there’s a flaw in the logic. It is not possible to get ready, and none of these prices will be a shock. They will be a burden and an outrage, but you cannot plausibly call yourself shocked about the fact that mindless destruction and widespread instability end up costing everyone money.

The framing matters: every time someone advises preparedness, they are implicitly suggesting that you have some agency. You have wisdom and the capacity for forethought, which will insulate you against the coming hardship. Which would be great, except it’s bananas. There is no personal responsibility you can bring to bear on geopolitics, there are no hatches to batten down: the only reasonable adjustment you can make is to need less stuff.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist