Ask HN: How do you get work done while there is a war in Europe?

Romania and Poland would be the first hits. You're last.

None of those tragedies as you call them had the direct potential to turn nuclear based on the threats of one of the parties involved.

> How did you keep your focus on working for the last several years, while the war has been raging in Yemen? Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Yemen, with a millions displaced and starved to death - many orders of magnitude greater than the death and suffering that has taken place in Ukraine.

Your entire premise is fraudulent: of course all people do not matter to all people equally the same. Family, tribe, city, state, nation, culture, ethnicity, race, class, religion. People choose to care about other people based on such qualifications as a matter of routine throughout all of history, it is normal and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

If you're in Britain and your family is in Ukraine, of course you're going to care more about what's going on in Ukraine than what is going on in Yemen. If you're second or third generation Ukrainian in the US, of course you're likely to care a lot more about what's going on in Ukraine than in Yemen.

If you culturally relate to Ukrainians far more than you culturally relate to people in Yemen, of course you're going to be drawn to what's going on in Europe more than in Yemen. That's perfectly normal and entirely moral.

You don't have to care about every person on the planet equally, and any claim to the contrary is espousing not only an immoral philosophy but an impossible one: you couldn't follow such a value system even if you tried. Such an impossible value system is only built to drown people in guilt and control, it serves no other purpose.

As an eastern(-ish) European[1] with fuzzy memories of experiencing a small war as a ~4 year old kid, this has been extremely hard to watch. Even though I live in USA now, I don’t remember ever being this affected by a news cycle.

Wednesday evening when the news of totally-not-invasion first broke was tough. Thursday was basically a write off. Friday was luckily so busy I didn’t have time for interneting.

Ultimately what worked was to remind myself all this is outside the sphere of my influence, there’s nothing actionable I can do, and following minute-by-minute news is just giving someone else free reign of my mind. Don’t need people’s hot takes and armchair analysis. A daily balanced report from a proper journalist outfit is enough.

edit: What has also helped was deciding early on that should this go beyond Ukraine into the rest of Europe, I’m flying my family out immediately. There’s only 918 miles by road between Kyiv and where my family lives. Making that decision in advance and with clear pull-the-trigger criteria makes it easier to stop stressing.

[^1] Slovenia

Industrial civilization is already in a state of collapse, plenty of people on HN have done a great job doubling down on the "this is fine", but even prior to the Ukraine invasion, it was hard to put your head down an work for brighter future you know doesn't exist. The immediacy of the war in Ukraine is just harder for most people to ignore.

But just today we got another update from the IPCC [0] confirming what many people paying attention have already known: “Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.” Key phrase there being liveable future Most people on HN don't believe climate change will be that bad, but for those paying attention we're already on a ticking clock. In 2014 I saw all of this, 2020 onward being progressively worse was something I knew was inevitable.

End of the day you realize that you have to eat, pay rent, etc. so you have to work. Tech workers have had a really great luxury of possibly enjoying or even loving their day job, but that's not why people have to work. We've always lived in a kafkaesque world, tech workers have just been shielded from it.

The only advice is to try to cut out the news and twitter a bit. It's mostly disinformation on there anyway, nobody really knows exactly what's happening and plenty of people have an agenda to push.

Spend so more time consuming "slow" media. Read a novel, some philosophy, or just spend time listening to music. The world will be getting increasingly stressful over the years, it's a good idea to start figuring out how you are going to life in a world of loss.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/ipcc-iss...