A close friend told me about the Russia-Ukraine war: “now I ran out of being afraid, I don’t have any resources left to be constantly terrified”. Watching the news for the last two weeks was torture. And this is for the lucky ones who don’t have their houses shelled, children wounded, family fighting. So we started doomscrolling, obsessively checking feeds, starting and ending the days with war news. And the more we scrolled, the more we felt doom and gloom, as media sells fear, with content targeted to enrage engage.
Regardless, it’s helpful to keep up to date, as this war is like no other in recent history. Just thinking of the existential threat of a possible nuclear conflict between the West and Russia would make us pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine. The Russian attacks on Ukrainian nuclear facilities keep us all panicked and throw doubts on nuclear energy strategies. Should a country invest in nuclear plants if conflicts arise in the following decade?
Then, as political scientist Ian Bremmer wrote:
When the world’s largest grain exporter attacks the fifth-largest grain exporter, and when the world’s largest gas exporter and second-largest oil exporter gets cut off from the global trade and financial system, the cumulative impact on everyone in the planet is so much greater than any amount of poverty, deprivation, and death Syrians, Afghans, and Yemenis are experiencing. It doesn’t take away from their suffering, but it makes it completely understandable that everyone in the world would pay more attention to Ukraine than to them.
It is only a matter of time until unrest and civil wars start spreading across the world when two powerful breadbasket countries are at war. The world’s supply of crops such as wheat or corn is at risk, jeopardising global food security and becoming “catastrophic for the entire world”.
There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.
Alfred Henry Louisville
Yes, we will all pay the price for this war, in money or in blood. And so, we should consume information about this war. Nevertheless, there are orders of magnitude between being informed and being tormented.
So, to keep sane, we should first manage our exposure to the information ecosystem as we are at war with disinformation (information meant to deceive – e.g., trolls posting fake reports) or misinformation (defined by Nina Schick in her Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse book as “bad information with no malicious intent behind it” – e.g., our friends and family sharing disinformative content).
It is crucial to talk about the atrocities happening these days, but we should also remember we have a limit. As we learned during the pandemic, the conservation instinct will kick in, and after watching thousands of horrors, empathy fatigue and desensitisation will appear.
In these moments bleeding between night and light, we rediscover an ambivalence: the banality of evil and the compassion of humanity, when most of the time, most people do mostly good.