My mom called earlier this week urging me to start a fundraiser for a cousin from Ukraine who was badly injured by a Russian rocket and needs intensive care and prosthetics.

Put on the life jacket yourself and then help others - the emergency manual states. With all the pressure around I feel like my life jacket is disintegrating and I need to fix it in real-time while trying to also take a look around to see who needs help and figure out how to fix the situation so I don’t need the life jacket (build a raft? get a boat?).

I declined to help and am now probably hated by my bigger family: “you’re the computers guy, you know how to do it”.

Obviously, I could try to help my family with a fundraiser, but this would efficiently mean that I’d have to own the initiative and lose focus on everything else. So probably my life jacket would disintegrate and the raft I have been building, the people who were relying on it would get lost too.

For many people helping a war-injured cousin is a no-brainer priority. For me, the priority is to help people by doing what I can do best. The second priority is to be happy just because I have the luxury and the privilege of it.

Why I am doing what I am doing and what do I want to do? What is truly important? These questions are the reason why we recorded the audio diary about the motivation.

Did the audio feel like Lera and I carefully hold each other’s sanity? Because it is true. I hope you have a friend like this too. Thinking aloud together to figure out what is important is one way to get through a time like ours.

“The utopia for one subset of people is a dystopia for others” - Monika Bielskyte from Protopia Futures made me stumble while we were sitting by a forest lake.

Further on:

• How I get motivated by “weird” people

• Why I am wearing the crown on the cover