37 dead here. Five dead there. A whole family obliterated. A two-year-old killed.

Sometimes I feel like shouting; screaming even: “Wait, stop the clock! Five people died today!”

Five lives – of which each had only one. Five whole lives, with all the connections of life, and all that an individual life means and brings. Gone.

But I don’t scream or shout. Instead, I think about other things like natural peace and quiet, about an interesting book, or a concert maybe, or what I’m doing for the rest of the day.

Even when I was in Ukraine, life went on. A city can’t stop because X number of people died that day – killed not by natural disasters, or the kinds of unfortunate but largely unavoidable things that happen in life – but through the wilful actions and destruction of war.

Cities go on. People go on. The city flags hoisted in memory one day, then lowered, and life carried on – the other volunteers and I; all the people of the city who had not happened to die that morning or the previous night; all the people who still had their lives to live.

When I think about it like this, it is completely crazy. On some level I feel selfish, unbearably so. It is all very well being grateful, but carrying on like this feels like wilfully choosing to live in a parallel universe.

Of course, it is possible to do all sorts of little things around the edges: donate some money, volunteer at this or that – but these are the kinds of things that are mostly just a salve for the soul – something to feel good about; that give a sense of having done something, of helping in some small way – a way of alleviating the pressure, in other words. But they don’t get anywhere close to touching the root causes.

That said, what else can we do? We can go on social media and send messages into the ether. What that achieves is hard to gauge. Connections between people, social movements, collective action – these may have been stronger in real terms before the advent of social media.

What to do?