Yesterday I was in an online meeting with a potential client, and at one point I asked:

"What are the next steps? How much time do you think we'll need to get through the process and everything?"

They answered:

"Should be a few weeks, but I don't know for sure. Some of us are in the UK, but most live in Israel, and many were called to the front a few days ago. I don't know what's gonna happen, but this is a good distraction for me, working and having meetings all day."

Man, the world is fucked. Completely fucked. And it's crazy how this is getting into our normalcy, our way of life.

When COVID hit in 2020, we were panicked, we didn’t know what to do, yet we stayed home like we were told. We went through this for over a year in most cases, and when we got back on our feet, we were hit again, when Russia hit Ukraine.

Maybe some American friends do not feel this like us Europeans do, but the war in Ukraine was really a major shock: a war in the European continent was not seen since the Yugoslavia breakup in the 90s. Still, it was a local war, between countries that wanted to fight for the best territory.

We weren’t scared for us, we were preoccupied that a lot of people were losing lives. We were preoccupied for them. But as preoccupied as one can be when they watch news on TV and comment on how we need peace and whatever.

A lot of wars are fought, but we mostly don’t know or understand them until they cause some kind of spectacular turning point.

Most didn’t knew about the Serbia-Kosovo war, that’s been happening for years, until a few weeks ago when NATO/ONU soldiers were hit in a battle. Others (me included) didn’t know about what was happening in the Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan until tens of thousand of people escaped from there, and so on.

But now we’re constantly bombarded by news, and every major news outlet has every reason to talk about anything that would increase their click count. So we know more, and we know real-time.

And that makes us more anxious.

I can only imagine how the people on the other side of the call were coping with stress, anxiety and fear. But the only thing I could say was:

“Stay safe. I hope that working on this together will help distract you from what’s happening outside your house.”

I don’t know how I could help. Yes, I could donate or whatever, but in this case, I don’t think Israel needs money: it’s a high-tech country that exports his tech all over the world, just like Ukraine in fact.

But the thing is that Israel is attacking Gaza because Gaza attacked Israel. But why has Gaza attacked Israel? And why does Gaza even exist?

So, there’s a lot of stress even in thinking about all of this.

I can’t imagine living it.