I Am Afraid I Can No Longer Take the News Seriously

By Matthew Parish

Monday 12 October 2026

I have developed a problem. I can no longer take the news seriously. This is an awkward condition for somebody who writes a newspaper, and I am conscious that admitting it may represent a professional error of some magnitude. Nevertheless, after repeated journeys between Lviv, Kharkiv and Western Europe, I have discovered that much of what is presented to me as news now produces approximately the same emotional response as a restaurant menu advertising a temporarily unavailable dessert. I understand that somebody cares about it. I simply cannot remember why I am supposed to.

This condition did not develop overnight. It began gradually, somewhere between my first air raid alarm and my hundredth article explaining that the British Government was facing its gravest crisis since the previous Wednesday. At first I continued reading these reports conscientiously. A minister had said something inadvisable, an opposition politician had demanded that he withdraw it, a journalist had discovered that somebody had attended a party four years earlier, and Westminster was described as “reeling”. I would read all this with the dutiful attention of a British citizen abroad, before looking out of the window and wondering whether the noise I had just heard was a Russian missile.

After a while, Westminster seemed to spend so much time reeling that I became concerned about its balance. Perhaps Parliament should install handrails. The British political establishment apparently staggers continuously from crisis to crisis, although curiously everybody still manages to arrive at the television studios on time. Governments are perpetually “on the brink”, ministers are constantly “fighting for their political lives”, and political parties undergo “existential crises” with such frequency that one begins to suspect that British politics has discovered a form of existentialism considerably more exhausting than anything contemplated by Sartre.

Then I went to Kharkiv, where existential crises have a less metaphorical character. There the question of whether something will continue to exist can occasionally be answered by looking at the building in question the following morning. This has the unfortunate effect of ruining political journalism for you, because once you have encountered the literal meaning of words such as “devastating”, “catastrophic” and “existential”, their metaphorical deployment to describe a disappointing opinion poll begins to feel excessive.

Kharkiv itself is partly responsible for my deteriorating condition. It is an extraordinarily bad place in which to preserve the Western hierarchy of anxieties, because the city combines genuine danger with an almost offensive determination to remain normal. People go to work. Restaurants open. Couples flirt. Taxi drivers complain. Somebody is always late. Somebody has drunk too much. Somebody is having an affair. Somebody is organising a conference. Somebody has failed to organise the conference properly. Somebody wants to know whether you are going to pay for another round.

Then the air raid alarm sounds, and everybody checks a telephone with approximately the same enthusiasm with which a London commuter checks whether the Central Line is delayed. There may be a discussion about what is flying, from which direction it is coming and whether anybody proposes to do anything about it. Frequently nobody does, because dinner has arrived. This is not quite the behaviour one expects from people supposedly inhabiting the front pages of Western newspapers, but Ukrainians have inconveniently declined to live as permanent symbols of geopolitical tragedy.

The first time you experience this, you are impressed by everybody’s courage. The fiftieth time, you are annoyed because the alarm has interrupted a conversation. Eventually you acquire the dangerous Ukrainian habit of assessing explosions by whether anybody else in the room appears interested. If nobody looks up, you continue drinking. If one person looks up, you may check Telegram. If everybody looks up simultaneously, you begin to suspect that perhaps this particular contribution to Russian foreign policy deserves your attention.

At some point during this process, your telephone delivers a notification from Britain. A television presenter has said something controversial about another television presenter. The nation is divided. Social media has erupted. There are demands for an investigation, and somebody whom you have never heard of has described the incident as “deeply troubling”. You look around the Kharkiv bar in which nobody has stopped drinking despite the possibility of Russian ordnance passing overhead, and you realise that your ability to participate in the national conversation has suffered irreversible damage.

The Americans, naturally, operate on a larger scale. America does not merely have controversies; it has constitutional emergencies. Every election is the most important election in history, which raises the interesting question of how history keeps surviving them. Every presidential statement may herald the end of democracy. Every judicial ruling is either the final triumph of liberty or the opening chapter of dictatorship. Cable television employs entire populations of commentators whose professional responsibility appears to consist of looking alarmed beneath enormous red graphics.

Washington is perpetually at a crossroads. It has been at this crossroads for so long that somebody ought to build a motel. There could be a petrol station, a diner and perhaps a small museum devoted to previous existential moments through which the United States somehow survived. Tourists might purchase commemorative mugs bearing inscriptions such as “DEMOCRACY ENDED HERE, 2017”, “DEMOCRACY ENDED HERE AGAIN, 2021” and “THIS TIME WE REALLY MEAN IT”.

Europe possesses a quieter but equally impressive talent for manufactured urgency. Brussels can transform the regulation of an industrial component nobody knew existed into a moral struggle over the future of the European project. France periodically discovers that civilisation is threatened by pension reform and responds by setting fire to something architecturally significant. Germany spends several years explaining why an urgently necessary measure is completely impossible, followed by a Tuesday afternoon upon which it becomes completely unavoidable.

Britain, meanwhile, remains in a category of its own because British political drama combines hysteria with extraordinary smallness. A minister’s WhatsApp messages can occupy the national consciousness for forty-eight hours. A photograph of two politicians standing too close to one another can generate three days of speculation. Somebody fails to declare hospitality worth £73.40, and constitutional scholars are summoned. By the weekend, the entire affair disappears and another one begins.

Repeated travel between Ukraine and Western Europe makes these transitions increasingly difficult. The journey itself becomes a form of psychological decompression, except that nobody tells your brain when it is supposed to change settings. You leave Kharkiv, where you have learned to distinguish approximately between things worth worrying about and things that are merely exploding. You arrive in Lviv, where the Austro-Hungarian façades, coffee houses and cobbled streets conspire to persuade you that Central European civilisation remains intact, notwithstanding the occasional interruption by an air raid alarm.

Lviv has developed its own wartime surrealism. You can sit beneath nineteenth-century architecture discussing Kant, Ukrainian politics or somebody’s catastrophic love life while an application on your telephone calmly informs you that objects capable of destroying your immediate surroundings are moving across the country. The waiter brings another glass of wine. Somebody complains about the music. The Habsburg Empire appears to have ended, but its cafés remain stubbornly operational during ballistic missile alerts.

Eventually you travel westwards and cross into Poland. This is where the psychological problem becomes acute, because somewhere around the border the hierarchy of human emergencies changes without warning. On one side, people are discussing missiles, mobilisation and electricity. On the other, somebody is extremely angry because the train is seven minutes late. Within several hours you have moved between two entirely rational systems of anxiety, yet your nervous system has failed to receive the memorandum announcing the transition.

Then you arrive in Western Europe and encounter the greatest danger of all: conversation. Somebody tells you about an intolerable dispute with a neighbour concerning recycling bins. You listen attentively because you are not a monster, and because disputes concerning recycling bins can indeed become unpleasant. Nevertheless, a treacherous portion of your brain has begun comparing the situation with the previous week’s activities in eastern Ukraine, and you realise that your capacity for proportion has become socially inconvenient.

This must never be said aloud. One cannot respond to a friend’s complaint about an incompetent broadband provider by observing that at least the broadband provider has not launched a glide bomb at his apartment. That would be obnoxious. Civilisation depends upon our ability to recognise different scales of inconvenience without constantly comparing them with the siege of Mariupol, and successful reintegration into Western society therefore requires the returning traveller to learn an elaborate system of facial expressions indicating sympathy about matters he has temporarily forgotten how to regard as serious.

I am becoming better at this. When somebody tells me that his flight has been delayed by ninety minutes, I can now produce an expression of authentic concern. When a restaurant says it cannot find my reservation, I resist the temptation to describe the incident as evidence of societal resilience. When a hotel informs me that my preferred room category is unavailable, I no longer immediately begin considering whether the building has functioning air defence.

The newspapers remain more difficult. They demand not merely sympathy but emotional participation. I am expected to become furious about whatever everybody became furious about yesterday, to understand why today’s outrage supersedes yesterday’s, and to forget both by tomorrow morning. This requires a degree of psychological flexibility I no longer possess. Ukraine has made me hopelessly literal.

The word “crisis”, for example, now causes difficulties. A crisis, as I understand the term, involves circumstances in which something extremely bad may happen unless somebody acts quickly. The British definition appears broader. It includes disappointing local election results, unfortunate interviews, disagreements between backbench MPs, photographs of politicians looking tired and almost anything occurring inside the headquarters of a major political party after 6 p.m.

“Chaos” has suffered a similar semantic expansion. In Ukraine, chaos may involve thousands of people fleeing an advancing army while infrastructure is destroyed around them. In Britain, chaos can mean that several trains have been cancelled at Euston. Both circumstances are admittedly undesirable, but I feel the English language ought to contain sufficient words to distinguish them.

The expression that has become entirely unusable is “existential threat”. In Western political discourse, almost everything now represents an existential threat to something else. Artificial intelligence is an existential threat. Populism is an existential threat. Climate change is an existential threat. The wrong candidate winning an election is an existential threat.

Occasionally one encounters so many existential threats before breakfast that the continued existence of anything whatsoever begins to seem statistically improbable.

Ukraine has the disadvantage of providing a control group. When Ukrainians say that their country faces an existential threat, they mean that another state has invaded it, annexed portions of its territory, destroyed its cities and periodically announces that Ukrainian nationhood is fictitious. This rather spoils the metaphor for everybody else. Once you have seen an actual existential threat, you become irritatingly demanding about the qualifications required for membership of the category.

Yet there is a danger in all this mockery, because the conclusion cannot simply be that Westerners are ridiculous and Ukrainians profound. Ukrainians are perfectly capable of being ridiculous. Indeed one of the consolations of living in Ukraine is discovering that war has not eliminated vanity, bureaucracy, romantic incompetence, professional jealousy, petty corruption, terrible management, bad restaurants, absurd arguments or people who send you messages at three o’clock in the morning that they profoundly regret at nine.

Nor does war automatically confer wisdom. Some people become courageous, while others become selfish. Some discover reserves of generosity they never knew they possessed, while others discover opportunities for making money. Heroism and idiocy coexist perfectly comfortably. The same person may display both before lunch.

The difference is not that people in a warzone become better human beings. It is that circumstances periodically impose an involuntary hierarchy upon their concerns. When the electricity goes out, restoring it matters more than the argument you were having. When somebody is wounded, getting him to hospital matters more than whether you like him. When an air raid begins, the day’s social-media controversy may suddenly reveal itself to possess rather less metaphysical significance than its participants imagined.

Peace conceals these hierarchies because peaceful societies have the extraordinary luxury of allowing small matters to become large. This is not evidence of decadence so much as evidence of success. I would infinitely prefer a civilisation in which people complain about cancelled trains to one in which they discuss artillery ranges. The passenger furious about his missing luggage is enjoying a privilege for which Ukrainians are currently fighting: the right to live in a society where missing luggage can plausibly qualify as the worst thing that happened to you that day.

This is why my growing inability to take Western news seriously is accompanied by an uncomfortable affection for it. The absurdity is precious. May Britain continue to have political scandals so small that they require three columnists to explain why they matter. May Americans continue to believe that their civilisation can be destroyed by an opinion poll. May Brussels continue issuing regulations incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, because bureaucratic incomprehensibility is vastly preferable to military occupation.

The difficulty comes when these peaceful societies begin mistaking their luxuries for catastrophes. Western public discourse has developed an addiction to maximum emotional intensity. Everything must be historic, unprecedented, devastating or existential because ordinary importance no longer generates sufficient attention. The vocabulary escalates while the events remain stubbornly moderate, until a politician giving an unsuccessful interview is described in language previously reserved for the fall of empires.

War reverses this process. Ukrainians frequently describe horrifying events in language of extraordinary understatement because exaggeration becomes unnecessary when reality has already done the work. A building has been destroyed. Someone has been killed. The electricity will be off until tomorrow. The Russians attacked again. There is no need to add that the situation is “deeply concerning”.

This linguistic economy becomes addictive. After enough time in Ukraine, you begin craving sentences that simply mean what they say. You become suspicious of headlines containing the words “fury”, “bombshell”, “chaos” or “humiliation”. You develop an almost pathological desire to ask whether anybody has actually died, whether anything has actually been destroyed and whether the alleged crisis will still exist on Monday.

Usually it will not.

The worst stage of my condition occurs upon returning to Britain and discovering that everybody knows about a controversy of which I am entirely ignorant. There will be a name. The name means nothing to me. Somebody will explain that this person made a statement about another person who then posted something online, after which a third person intervened and the original person clarified his remarks.

I nod gravely. This is essential.

I have learned never to admit immediately that I do not know what anybody is talking about, because the resulting explanation can last twenty minutes. Instead I say something noncommittal such as, “Yes, I saw something about that,” which is technically true because I have now seen the expression on the face of the person telling me. With luck, the conversation moves to something comprehensible, such as the weather.

Then I return to Ukraine and the entire apparatus disappears again. In Lviv, the cafés are full. In Kharkiv, people continue going about their business beneath circumstances that would cause most Western newsrooms to deploy the word “apocalypse” in seventy-two-point type. Somebody complains about the government. Somebody complains about the Americans. Somebody complains about the Europeans. Everybody complains about somebody else.

There is laughter as well. This is the part of wartime Ukraine that outsiders sometimes find hardest to understand, because Western representations of war divide human behaviour into tragedy and heroism while leaving insufficient room for comedy. Yet people living under sustained pressure become extraordinarily funny. Black humour is not incidental to survival; it is one of its technologies.

You joke because the alternative is impossible. You laugh about air raid alarms, bureaucracy, electricity cuts and the incomprehensible incompetence of institutions that somehow continue functioning despite being incomprehensibly incompetent. You laugh about your own fear. You laugh about the Russians. You laugh because laughter restores ordinary human proportions to circumstances determined to abolish them.

Perhaps this is ultimately why the Western news cycle now seems so peculiar to me. It tries desperately to enlarge small things, whereas wartime humour tries desperately to shrink large ones. A Western headline transforms an awkward interview into a national emergency. A Ukrainian joke transforms a national emergency into something that can be endured until breakfast.

Of the two psychological strategies, I know which one I have come to prefer. Eventually, however, I shall presumably return permanently to the West. I will have to relearn the appropriate responses. I shall need to become upset when trains are cancelled, irritated when the Wi-Fi is slow and genuinely interested when somebody explains why a minister must resign because of something discovered in an email.

I hope I manage it. There would be something melancholy about remaining permanently incapable of caring about small problems, because small problems are among the rewards of civilisation. One should aspire to inhabit a country in which the day’s principal disaster is administrative incompetence.

But I suspect part of the damage is irreversible. Somewhere inside my head there will always remain a Kharkiv test for breaking news. It will ask whether the event will matter tomorrow, whether anybody is actually in danger, whether anything has genuinely changed and whether the people described as being “in crisis” would recognise a crisis if one landed in the car park. Most stories will fail.

Then I shall put down the newspaper and think about Ukraine. I shall remember Lviv at night, with its beautiful old façades and its air raid sirens. I shall remember Kharkiv drinking, working, flirting, swearing and carrying on beneath a sky from which unpleasant things occasionally descend. I shall remember people who learned the difference between inconvenience and catastrophe without ever asking to be taught it.

The television will continue murmuring in the background. Westminster will be reeling again, Washington will have arrived at another crossroads, Brussels will be deeply concerned and somebody somewhere will have posted something unacceptable on the internet. Distinguished commentators will explain that the next forty-eight hours are critical.

I shall wish them all the very best.

Then I shall order another drink and wait to see whether anything actually happens.