And most of us are too comfortable to notice
Let me say the thing out loud that most people are dancing around.
We are already in a world war.
Not approaching one. Not on the brink of one. Not watching the ominous trailer for one on the evening news before switching over to some baking competition to soothe our nerves. We are in it. Right now. Today. And the fact that most of us haven’t quite registered that yet… well, that’s sort of the whole point of this piece, isn’t it.
Russia’s war in Ukraine ground into its fifth year this month. Five years. Half a decade of cities being levelled, of families buried under rubble, of an entire nation running on sheer defiance and borrowed time. Ukraine’s power grid has been systematically dismantled… roughly half of what existed before the invasion is now gone, bombed into dust by a campaign that has sent over fifty thousand kamikaze drones into Ukrainian skies in 2025 alone. Not a statistic. Fifty thousand moments where someone looked up and thought this might be the one that kills me.
And then, just days ago, on the 28th of February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran… assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, targeting nuclear facilities, military commanders, cities. Tehran. Isfahan. Qom. A joint operation with the rather cinematic names of Operation Roaring Lion and Operation Epic Fury. North Korea, already having deployed ten thousand troops to fight alongside Russia, watches from the wings. China continues its slow, deliberate flex around Taiwan. Drones entered Polish airspace last September, launched from Russian and Belarusian territory. Poland’s Prime Minister stood up and said a large military conflict was closer than at any time since the Second World War.
Zelenskyy, just last week, told the BBC he believes Putin has already started World War Three.
So why… why… does it feel like most of us are treating this like background noise?
The Comfortable Disconnection
Here’s my honest theory, for what it’s worth.
We have been so thoroughly insulated from consequence… by comfort, by entertainment, by the endless algorithmic scroll designed to keep us mildly stimulated and deeply passive… that we have collectively lost the ability to feel the weight of something that doesn’t land directly on our doorstep.
Wars happen on screens now. They get thirty seconds between a celebrity divorce and a viral dog video. We watch footage of missile strikes with the same detached fascination we’d give a blockbuster film, then we close the tab and order something off Amazon and feel, very vaguely, that someone should probably do something about all that.
And I’m not here to perform outrage about that. I’ve done it too. We all have. It’s almost a survival mechanism at this point… the sheer volume of catastrophe available for consumption in any given day is genuinely overwhelming, and the brain, being the clever self-preserving organ it is, learns to dissociate. To scroll past. To feel vaguely concerned without that concern ever hardening into anything as inconvenient as action.
But there’s a cost to that. A very real, very personal cost that we don’t talk about nearly enough.
When you consistently witness something you believe is wrong and do nothing… not because you can’t, but because it feels outside your grasp, too big, too political, too complicated… something in you quietly diminishes. You lose the thread back to yourself. To your own values. And you end up living in this strange dissociated half-life where you know things are serious but you’ve trained yourself not to feel it too deeply, because feeling it too deeply would require you to do something, and doing something is frightening.
So we keep scrolling. And the world keeps burning.
What Crisis Has Always Done
Here’s the thing about catastrophe that history has been quietly insisting on for centuries… it strips things back.
Not kindly. Not gently. But with a brutal, clarifying honesty that peacetime comfort simply cannot replicate.
Every major crisis in human history has produced, alongside its devastation, a strange and almost paradoxical flowering of human authenticity. People who didn’t know what they believed suddenly found out. People who thought themselves cowards surprised themselves with courage. Communities that had been atomised… neighbours who barely acknowledged each other in the supermarket… suddenly found themselves sharing resources, skills, warmth.
The Second World War… for all its horror, and the horror was incomprehensible… produced a generation who knew exactly who they were. Who had tested themselves against something real and come away changed. Not unscathed, never unscathed, but forged. They had a relationship with their own values that we, in our cushioned, optimised, algorithmically curated lives, largely do not.
I am not romanticising war. I want to be very clear about that. There is nothing romantic about Kyiv’s apartment buildings losing heating in winter because Russia’s drone campaign has annihilated half the country’s power generation. There is nothing romantic about families in Iran waking up on the first of March 2026 to a city that had just been struck in a coordinated military campaign. The suffering is real and it is catastrophic and it deserves to be treated as such.
But I am saying this…
Crisis separates the wheat from the chaff. Always has. Probably always will.
And right now, in this strange interlude of scrolling passivity, it’s becoming increasingly urgent to ask which one you are.
The Outsourcing of Responsibility
We have become, as a society, absolutely world-class at outsourcing.
We outsource our food production, our care of the elderly, our children’s entertainment, our emotional regulation to streaming services, our sense of community to social media platforms that monetise our loneliness while pretending to cure it. And we have done, very successfully, the same thing with our civic and moral responsibility.
It’s the government’s problem. It’s the UN’s problem. It’s NATO’s problem. It’s the problem of people who understand geopolitics, which I definitely don’t, so what can I really contribute, honestly.
And look, I get it. The problems are enormous. The machinery of global conflict is vastly beyond any individual’s direct control. I’m not about to tell you to storm a governmental building or start a one-man militia. That’s not the point.
The point is the posture. The internal posture.
The question of whether you are living as someone who has a voice, a perspective, and the willingness to use both… or whether you have quietly, incrementally, without ever quite deciding to, handed that responsibility to someone else and convinced yourself that’s just how things are.
Because here’s what I’ve noticed. The people who do take responsibility… for their own lives, for their communities, for their voice in the public conversation… are not special. They haven’t been granted some rare constitutional bravery that most of us lack. They have simply made a decision, often quietly, often without fanfare, that they will not pretend they can’t see what they can plainly see.
They write the letter. They go to the meeting. They say the uncomfortable thing at the dinner table. They read beyond the headline. They form a view. They hold a view. They don’t wait for permission to care.
The Wheat and The Chaff
I keep coming back to this image.
Wheat and chaff. The useful and the inessential. The substance and the husk.
And I’m not talking about some tribal division of Good People and Bad People… that’s too simple and frankly too easy a story to tell. I’m talking about something more interior than that. More personal.
There is a version of you that, when things get serious, genuinely shows up. That gets honest about what matters. That stops performing a life on social media and starts actually living one. That has the courage to be afraid and act anyway. That reconnects with the people around them, with their community, with some sense of purpose that isn’t just optimising their personal brand.
And then there’s the other version. The one that waits. The one that outsources. The one that keeps the ambient dread at a manageable simmer, never hot enough to actually move on.
The pressure of a world in genuine crisis… and I want to be honest with you, we are living in a moment of genuine, historic crisis… has a way of deciding which version you are. Not because crisis is good, but because reality, eventually, stops accepting your excuses.
The world is entering an era where the stakes of being checked out are no longer abstract. Where the consequences of collective passivity compound in ways that will eventually land on all of us, not just on the people unlucky enough to live in the direct path of the guns.
What you believe matters. What you say matters. How you live matters. Whether you take actual responsibility for your own life… your finances, your relationships, your mental and physical health, your contribution to your immediate world… matters more now than it has in a generation.
So What Are You Going To Do?
I’m not going to give you a seven-step plan. That’s not what this is.
But I am going to ask you something, and I’d like you to sit with it rather than skim past it in search of a conclusion that lets you off the hook.
If this is a world war… and every serious analyst, every conflict expert, every head of government in Europe will tell you that the architecture of one is either already assembled or being assembled right now… who are you going to be in it?
Not militarily. Not necessarily even politically, though both may become relevant.
But personally. Humanly. In terms of the way you live, the things you say, the extent to which you refuse to sleepwalk through a historical moment of genuine consequence.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth that has been rattling around in my head for months…
The world doesn’t need more people who are vaguely aware of how serious things are.
It needs people who actually feel it. Who let it mean something. Who decide, in whatever sphere they inhabit, to show up properly.
Wars have always forced that reckoning. And this one, whether we call it by its name or not, is already doing the same.
The only question is whether you’ll be the wheat… or the chaff the wind takes.
Dominus Owen Markham writes about the uncomfortable truths that sit just below the surface of modern life. If this piece made you feel something, share it with someone who needs to read it.
Until Next Time
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