Back in Action
May you live in interesting times.
– an old Chinese curse
Two years of a global pandemic. Then a massive war in Europe, in my beloved Ukraine of all places.1 I never thought we’d see any of this. We sure live in interesting times…
I think it’s safe to say that the past 3 months haven’t been the time of my life. They were also quite unproductive for me, as I found it very hard to focus, especially during the early days of the war. I was quite angry or frustrated a lot the time. The rest of the time I was anxious.
I probably read more news articles the first month of the war than I had read in the past 10 years combined. I’ve also made the mistake to start reading news comments and to engage in discussions regarding the war with some complete morons on various news sites and social media. That was dumb! You can take my word for it - helping charities and refugees directly is a lot more rewarding than arguing with they kind of people who are supporting Russia in this war. Still, I guess we all hope that through reason we can help the misguided people around us the truth… But some beliefs are pretty hard to change…
I did manage to do a bit of work on the OSS front in the mean time, but not nearly as much as I wanted. My desire to write code or articles had hit rock bottom. In all honesty my desire to do a lot of things had hit rock bottom for a while.
In early May I decided I should pull myself together. You might have noticed that the activity on my OSS projects and blogs has been almost back to “normal” levels. I changed a few small things in my daily routine that were helpful:
- I’ve killed the Facebook app on my phone and I’ve barely checked Facebook in over a month.
- I’ve stopped checking a dozen of Telegram news channels every few minutes - now I’m mostly following daily summaries of the war news and steer clear of the live coverage.
- I’ve (almost) stopped reading news comments as well.
Knowing my Ukrainian family and friends are reasonably safe these days and that the Russians are unlikely to win the war also helped reduce my news anxiety.
Social media can be truly toxic, especially in times of crisis. We’re better off without it. I know that I am. Now I plan to channel everything gained by cutting down on news and social media into more productive activities. It’s good to be back. See you around!