The Relief of Not Being Alone in the News

I do not know about you, but I am tired of being the news.

This past Tuesday, I gave an interview to an Indian news network about the mental health toll of living in Israel right now: the war, the uncertainty, the constant low hum of threat that rewires a population’s nervous system over time. I spoke about regulation, about what it does to a person to live for years inside a state of anticipatory anxiety.

At the end of the segment, the anchor said: now we move to Kashmir and Pakistan.

And something in me smiled. Quietly, almost shamefully. Oh good, I thought. We are not the only ones.

I sat with that smile for a long time afterward, because it surprised me. It was not schadenfreude. It was something closer to the relief a person feels when they stop being the only one in the room everyone is looking at. When the spotlight moves, even for a moment, to someone else’s pain, and you are allowed to exhale.

For years now, Israel has been a fixture of the global news cycle. Not as a place where people live ordinary lives, raise children, argue about parking, fall in love, but as a story. A situation. A case study in conflict, trauma, geopolitics. To be constantly visible in this way is its own kind of exhaustion, separate from the exhaustion of the events themselves. There is the trauma, and then there is the trauma of being watched experiencing the trauma, asked to narrate it, to make sense of it for an audience, again and again.

So when the broadcast moved on to Kashmir, some part of me thought: good. Let them carry the lens for a while. Let someone else explain what fear does to a body, what it means to live with sirens, with grief that has nowhere to land.

But underneath that relief was something else, something quieter and more honest. A longing. Not for someone else’s suffering to be visible instead of mine. A longing for no one’s suffering to be the lead story. A longing for a broadcast that simply ends, with no segment about anyone’s war, because there is nothing of that kind to report.

This, I think, is what ve’bacharta ba’chaim, choosing life, actually asks of us. Not grand gestures. Not heroism. Just the quiet, almost embarrassing wish for normalcy. For boredom. For a Tuesday with nothing in it but the ordinary weight of an ordinary day.

We rarely admit how radical that wish is. To want quiet, in a place and time that has made noise into an identity, is itself a kind of resistance. It is choosing the unremarkable over the symbolic. It is refusing to be only a dateline.

I do not know when that Tuesday comes. But I know I felt its shape, for a second, in the space between one country’s grief and another’s, in the brief, guilty lightness of not being the only one.