Ask HN: How do you get work done while there is a war in Europe?
Since Russia started the invasion of Ukraine, I feel sad and baffled while being glued to news sources covering the war, mostly on Twitter.
How do you keep your focus on working during these times?
91 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadThe best way to empower yourself is to tackle the things which you can change. The more empowered you are, the more agency you have to tackle tragic events. Although it is unlikely that you will be able to personally prevent wars, there are other smaller problems you can engage with.
Balance all this against the time you spend looking at news daily.
But, with these events today, I'm being honest with myself: I live within 5 miles of a major, international US airport. Within 25 miles of a major military installation. Within 35 miles of a major US port. If I go out 50 miles, there are quite literally dozens of high priority targets in SoCal. My point being: If the SLBMs start flying, my entire world is going to be flattened by an air burst before anyone even gets a warning.
So, while I am paying active attention (more than I should) to this situation, I also know that, ultimately, worst-case scenario, it really doesn't matter. With that perspective, when I find myself looking at my social feeds a little too much or watching / reading a little too much news, I walk away from it to go spend time with my family.
And to answer your assertion, I live within 5km of the largest naval port in western Europe, which is also the Royal Navy's only nuclear repair and refuelling facility. I think it's safe to say that it'd be fairly high on the list of targets.
It sucks, and I bet the closer (geographically) you are to the conflict, the worse it gets.
Trying to do your routine helps sometimes, but I don't think it's feasible to completely forget about what's happening.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
That’s all following Twitter “news” is. Entertainment.
Many people, like me, fell in the trap of getting "hyperinformed" during COVID, only to find out staying on the bleeding edge of an evolving situation is like having another full-time job. Excessive infotainment only heightens anxiety.
But if it is about preparation, then ask yourself what you can (or will) do to prepare for a worst case scenario, then middle scenario, then not so bad scenario. Take care of what you can, and tell yourself clearly that you’ve done what you need to do there’s no need to worry about it anymore.
I give the news 15 minutes of my time every day. Even when events like this happen, 15 minutes.
I, nor you, can meaningfully change the course of events; even if we could, neither of us can tell if we would improve things or make them worse. The only people who can change this now are the Russians starting a civil war in their own country to overthrow their leader to save their brothers and sisters in Ukraine, and I wish them all luck.
I'll try that. Do you use pure self control for that? A timer?
On the contrary, you'll be the last target.
Ukraine is obviously the first, the countries bordering Ukraine in the South, especially Poland are at risk, then the rest of Europe and finally the US.
The situation seems very different in Europe. The war is pretty much the only thing people are talking about on the channels I use to stay in touch with people in Finland. If I want to avoid thinking about the war, it's not enough to avoid the news. I must also avoid friends and family.
The world is an international community, we sink or swim together. A tragedy in a faraway country is no different than one in my backyard.
A lot of people in Finland may lose their jobs soon, because ~10% of foreign trade used to be with Russia. There is a feeling that the world has changed permanently, but nobody knows what will emerge. Ukraine is resisting the invasion, and ordinary people are sending money directly to its military. Even many activists on the left think that donating to traditional charities is insufficient. Meanwhile Russia seems to be only a shadow of its former self, which has awakened old fears of its collapse. And of refugee masses that could overwhelm Finland.
And here in the US, you can easily ignore all that, because you don't see the consequences in your daily life.
I don't get why this is such a hard concept for people to understand.
That was true until Putin decided to saber rattle his nukes. If things go boom, I'll see the flash, and be roasted somewhere between 10 and 50 seconds later, depending on which industrial site they take out first.
I feel very much the same and I wish you well.
Fortunately I’ve noticed that I can’t focus on the horrible reality of this war and also on coding or reviewing PRs or debugging some code. If I can focus on a concrete task my mood improves for as long as I can hold the focus.
Also as usual, physical activity helps. I landed in Tbilisi with just a suitcase and didn’t have time to find a gym or set up a routine, but even just walking up the steep hills in the city improves my mood. Don’t underestimate the positive effect this has on the mental state.
This war is not going away soon and my people aren’t going to be out of danger any time soon, so it’s critical to find a way to focus on what needs to be done and not waste time and energy fretting. Easy to say, not so easy to do.
Your energy is much better used in other ways.
Unfortunately, platitudes are not always the answer.
It's natural to be affected by things we cannot affect, but it is not rational.
A rational agent or rational being is a person or entity that always aims to perform optimal actions based on given premises and information.[0] Thus, an agent that spends energy analyzing impossible scenarions cannot be rational.
>Your comment could be interpetted as saying that it is irrational to not ignore these things.
That would be a valid interpretation of my comment.
"Doomscrolling, the compulsion to engross oneself in negative news, may be the result of an evolutionary mechanism where humans are “wired to screen for and anticipate danger”.
The anticipation bit made it clear. So now is the question: how to over come it? Looks like I need a full blown news detox.
Unfortunately it is because "new sources" generate your outrage and decide what you are going to focus on. This is not to say what's happening in Ukraine isn't a tragedy or that we all shouldn't be concerned, but it is to say that there are tragedies and wars raging around the world all the time that are far worse than what is happening in Ukraine today. Many are familiar with Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" which details exactly this issue. If you are obsessed with Russia's war on Ukraine and barely give a passing thought to the much more deadly and horrific Saudi/US war on Yemen you ought to consider why exactly that is.
My question was about recent events - I am not diminishing any other wars ever stated, at all. Disclosure: I am a pacifist.
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.
If you find you can't do it through sheer willpower alone, there are plenty of ways to more or less simulate an airgap. Various browser extensions can block sites during work hours. If you find yourself turning it off all the time, you can make it harder on yourself by keeping a set of firewall rules at your router or DNS rules at a filtering provider that takes more than a click or two to turn off. If you're using company issued workstations from an office and they don't block the sites you find yourself wasting time on and don't allow you to install extensions or configure your own DNS, those won't work. A less drastic possibility is listening to news via radio as a constant background noise type of thing, or possibly even a television feed. At least that way you can still work while receiving updates. It should be less addictive since it's non-interactive and the feed is not algorithmically curated to be maximally addictive to you personally.
I tried that wiht my hosts file (/etc/hosts) and failed since it's a password and a comment character to enable the site back on. I do not control the firewall on the WiFi where I have my work setup.