How do you keep your focus on working during these times?
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.
I feel very much the same and I wish you well.
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.
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'll try that. Do you use pure self control for that? A timer?
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.
"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.
* pen/pencil and mini wire bound notebooks. I tried using Apple notes but the phone is a source of endless distraction.
I write down goals for the day, headlined by project name. When I’m done I cross them out.
* befocusedpro app for pomodoros
It has a pretty nice way to setup pomodoro tasks and isn’t trying to be much more than a pomodoro app. My employer uses Jira and my side projects use Trello or Apple notes. It sits on the mac menu bar and beeps when both the pomodoro and break are up. During breaks sometimes I respond to text messages or take a quick walk around but you could read news too.
I write down about 5 “goals” and try to get them all done
* streaks app iOS
This is like GitHub history for habits. After every befocusedpro pomodoro I check the streak for e.g. ( employer pomodoro ) or ( side project pomodoro )
Finally, I put my phone in do not disturb pretty much the whole time I’m trying to accomplish my pomodoros and the only exceptions are my significant other and mom / sister.
That’s it!
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.
The 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.
Wars go on every day, people suffer every day, it doesn't benefit you or them to obsessively watch.
I'd get it for people who live in or have close connections with the affected area, but knowing every update when you're on the other side of the world? What's the benefit?
Keeping up with the general situation, sure, but up to the minute all day watching... I don't get the point or the motivation besides which is ultimately entertainment, and not good entertainment.
Don't you get bored with news sources? CNN just repeats itself all day.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
My question was about recent events - I am not diminishing any other wars ever stated, at all. Disclosure: I am a pacifist.
If they can work from within an active war zone (Kyiv) I can do so from the comfort of my northern european couch.
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.
Me? I never cared about that war and I still don't, just like I don't care about any of the currently ongoing wars (Yemen, Syria, whatever). Not following the news makes life generally less unpleasant.
Throughout the pandemic there have been genocidal actions in Ethiopia and China, Duterte in the Philippines has made an incredible number of “extrajudicial killings” and brought total tyranny on the populace, and I’m sure there have been many other atrocities of which I am unaware.
I might question why you are giving so much mental weight to this conflict. I understand nukes are involved via Russia’s involvement, but this isn’t Russia’s only military action in the last number of years. Could it be that you have been primed to take this particular conflict Very Seriously by a news media which regularly downplays conflicts with more casualties and cultural significance?
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...
That Ghost of Kyiv story? Immediately called the clip BS since it's like Propaganda 101. Turns out the video on my timeline was from a video game.
Approaching my news feed as a hostile reader takes enough effort/energy that I genuinely just get tired and put it down to do something else.
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Hopefully there are some sensible Russians who will prevent Putin from running amok.
My routine consists of checking Hacker News, CNN and local media with the purpose of checking up on any new developments.
One rule i try to live by is no commenting while at work.
And while there is no sympathy at all for Putin, i have no problems with the Russian people, they are still very much welcome.
0.0.0.0 twitter.com