The Loneliness of Living in a War Zone

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 10 September 2026

War is conventionally described through noise. There are explosions, the crack of air defence, the sinister buzzing of drones, artillery in those parts of the country close enough to hear it and the electronic wailing of air raid sirens across cities hundreds of kilometres from the front. Yet one of the most profound experiences of living for years in a country at war is not noise at all. It is silence. It is the silence left by people who have gone away, the silence after an explosion when one waits to discover what has been hit, the silence of an apartment in the middle of the night after the air raid application has sounded and the silence that gradually develops between those who have lived through a war and those who have watched the same war from somewhere else.

This loneliness is difficult to describe because it is not necessarily the same thing as being alone. A person may live in the centre of a crowded Ukrainian city, work every day, visit restaurants, meet colleagues and pass thousands of people in the streets, yet nevertheless experience an extraordinary sense of isolation. War gradually dismantles the ordinary networks through which human beings understand their lives. Friends leave the country. Families become scattered across Europe. Colleagues join the Armed Forces. Relationships are conducted across borders. Familiar faces disappear from shops, cafés and offices. Some people return. Others do not. Some disappear because they have established new lives abroad and a smaller but terrible number disappear because they have been killed.

This is one of the less visible consequences of a long war. Cities remain standing but the human geography within them changes. The café is still there, but the people with whom one used to sit there have gone. The apartment remains but the person who used to visit it now lives in Warsaw. The restaurant survives but the waiter has joined the army. The railway station is still crowded but it has become associated with departures. A city can therefore remain physically recognisable while becoming emotionally unfamiliar. War creates ghosts before it creates ruins.

The initial months of a war do not necessarily produce this sensation because crisis can be intensely social. When the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, people telephoned one another constantly. They asked where their friends were, whether they were safe, whether they had fuel, whether they had somewhere to stay and whether they needed help. Every explosion produced messages. Every journey generated anxiety. People who had barely spoken for years rediscovered one another because catastrophe creates an immediate need for human contact. There was terror but there was also an extraordinary concentration of social energy.

A war lasting years is different. Nobody can remain psychologically mobilised indefinitely. The exceptional becomes routine. The air raid alarm sounds and people continue working. A telephone application reports drones crossing from one oblast into another and one calculates, almost casually, whether their trajectory is relevant. An explosion takes place somewhere across the city and one looks at a message channel to determine approximately where it occurred. If it was sufficiently far away, one goes back to sleep. This is not indifference. It is adaptation, and without adaptation ordinary life would become impossible.

Yet adaptation extracts a price. At the beginning of the war, fear was shared and therefore articulated. After years of war, fear is increasingly private. One does not telephone friends every time the siren sounds because the siren may sound every night. One does not send messages asking whether everyone is safe after every distant explosion because everyone has work in the morning. People learn which sounds matter and which do not. They learn the difference between the noise of air defence and something more alarming. They learn whether the windows should be opened, where the safest internal wall is and how much battery remains in the telephone. The extraordinary becomes technical.

There is a peculiar loneliness in this competence. When an explosion shakes the windows and another person is present, there is an involuntary exchange of glances. Nothing may need to be said. Each person confirms for the other that what has just happened was real. Afterwards there may be a joke, a curse or a discussion of whether it was an interception. Human beings have always processed danger socially. We look at one another to decide how frightened we should be and afterwards we turn frightening events into stories. This is one of the ways in which experience becomes psychologically manageable.

When a person lives alone, none of this happens. The explosion takes place. The windows shake. Perhaps the electricity disappears. One checks the telephone, listens for another explosion and waits. Eventually the all-clear sounds. There is nobody with whom to exchange the glance and nobody to whom it is necessary to say anything. One makes coffee in the morning and begins another working day. The event has happened entirely inside one’s own consciousness and this repeated internalisation of fear is one of the distinctive forms of loneliness produced by war.

There is another loneliness that emerges over time and it concerns those who live elsewhere. Friends abroad may care deeply about Ukraine. They may follow the news every day, donate money, telephone frequently and understand the military and political developments with considerable sophistication. Yet there remains an experiential distance between knowing about a war and living inside one. A person in London, Paris or New York may know precisely how many drones were launched during the night but he does not know what it feels like to hear one, wonder whether it is approaching and then make breakfast a few hours later.

This distinction can make ordinary conversation unexpectedly difficult. A friend complains that his flight was delayed. Another is furious because a restaurant reservation was cancelled. Somebody has been unable to sleep because the neighbours were making noise. None of these grievances is illegitimate. Human suffering cannot sensibly be arranged upon a single scale and peaceful life is valuable precisely because it permits people to worry about trivial things. Nevertheless, after living in a war zone for long enough, the emotional grammar of these conversations can become unfamiliar. One discovers that the things other people consider emergencies are no longer the things one considers emergencies.

The result is usually not confrontation but self-censorship. One does not reply that last night’s sleep was interrupted by missiles. One does not explain that the railway journey taken the previous week now passes buildings damaged in an attack. One does not continually remind people abroad that their ordinary inconveniences seem luxurious by comparison, because doing so would make friendship impossible. Instead one learns to participate in conversations whose assumptions one no longer entirely shares. This is another form of loneliness: not the absence of people but the growing inability to explain one’s experience to them without becoming tedious, melodramatic or morally overbearing.

War also produces a cult of resilience and this too has consequences. Ukraine has rightly been praised for her resilience. Businesses remain open. Trains continue running. Children continue studying. Couples marry. People attend concerts and restaurants. Electricity is restored after attacks. Damaged buildings are repaired and ordinary life resumes with remarkable speed. These things are genuinely admirable, but resilience can become a burden when it turns from an achievement into an expectation.

Once a person has survived the first year of war, people assume he will survive the second. Once he has endured the second, the third becomes less remarkable. After four years, endurance itself becomes ordinary. The resilient person becomes imprisoned by his reputation for resilience. He has survived blackouts, explosions, interrupted nights, cancelled journeys, dead friends, economic uncertainty and the repeated contraction of the future, so it is assumed that he will survive whatever comes next. Eventually there may be nobody to whom he feels entitled to say the simplest thing: I am tired.

Wartime tiredness is not necessarily dramatic. It is not always trauma and it is not necessarily despair. Often it is simply an accumulation of small burdens that never entirely disappear. Every journey requires another calculation. Every friendship abroad requires maintenance across distance. Every night contains the possibility of interruption. Every political development may have consequences for one’s personal future. Every acquaintance in uniform carries an unspoken possibility. None of these things alone is unbearable but together they produce a permanent tax upon the nervous system.

Friendship itself changes under these conditions. Some friendships become exceptionally strong because war strips relationships of their superficial elements. A person who helped another during an attack, drove through danger with him, gave him somewhere to sleep or remained present during a period of fear may acquire a significance that would normally take decades to develop. War compresses intimacy. People sometimes trust one another with extraordinary speed because circumstances have rendered the usual rituals of gradual acquaintance irrelevant.

Other friendships disintegrate just as quickly. Distance does its work. So does exhaustion. People become preoccupied with their own survival. Some leave Ukraine and gradually become absorbed into lives elsewhere. Others remain and find that they have less in common with those who departed. Some join the military and inhabit an entirely different reality from civilians. Some become consumed by charitable work. Some become poorer. Some become harder, quieter or angrier. War accelerates character, revealing virtues and defects that peacetime might have concealed for decades.

There is also the frightening ambiguity of silence. In a peaceful society, an unanswered message usually means that somebody is busy, forgetful or uninterested. In a country at war, there are additional possibilities. A person may be serving somewhere without communications. He may be in hospital. His telephone may have been destroyed. He may be dead. Most unanswered messages ultimately have mundane explanations but the existence of these darker alternatives changes the emotional meaning of waiting.

Perhaps the loneliest moments are nevertheless not the moments of attack but the ordinary evenings between them. An air raid at least creates activity. One checks the alerts, charges the telephone, moves away from the windows and decides whether to go to a shelter. Danger temporarily imposes structure upon time. The empty evening is different. Work has finished. The streets may be quiet. Friends are abroad, serving in the army, exhausted or occupied with their own problems. One could go to a restaurant but there is nobody one particularly wants to telephone. One sits in an apartment and hears the sounds of a city that remains alive but no longer feels quite as socially abundant as it once did.

War has removed many of the casual encounters that ordinarily protect people from loneliness. Populations have been displaced. Offices have changed. Travel has become more complicated. Families have divided across borders. People hesitate to make long-term plans because long-term plans contain assumptions that the war repeatedly defeats. Even romance changes when the future becomes unreliable. People continue to fall in love, marry and have children because human beings possess a magnificent refusal to surrender their private lives to history, but intimacy in wartime carries an unusual urgency. Tomorrow cannot be taken entirely for granted.

This shrinking of the future may be one of war’s most profound psychological effects. Peacetime encourages people to imagine their lives in years and decades: next summer, the new job, the house, retirement, the children growing older. War shortens the horizon. Plans remain possible but every plan contains an invisible qualification. The security situation may deteriorate. Another power station may be destroyed. The front may move. Mobilisation rules may change. A railway may be damaged. A business may fail. Someone may not come home.

Human relationships are built partly from shared memories but also from shared futures. We will go there next year. We will have dinner when you return. I will visit in the spring. We will do it when the war is over. In Ukraine, that final expression has acquired an almost metaphysical quality. “When the war is over” has become a country of the imagination in which postponed lives will supposedly resume.

Yet there is no reason to assume that the past will simply return. Some refugees will never come home. Some marriages will not survive separation. Some friendships will fade. Some soldiers will return as profoundly different people. Some buildings will be gone and some cities transformed. Those who remained throughout the war will themselves have changed. The future imagined in February 2022 has already disappeared because the people who imagined it no longer exist in precisely the same form.

This helps explain why the question sometimes asked by outsiders — why stay? — is more complicated than it appears. There are practical reasons for remaining in a war zone: employment, family, property, money, responsibilities and restrictions upon movement. There is also patriotism. But beneath all these explanations lies something more primitive. People remain because home is not simply the location in which the statistical probability of survival is highest. If human beings chose where to live according to actuarial calculations alone, the history of civilisation would look very different.

Home is where the streets contain memories. It is where the jokes make sense without explanation. It is where the architecture forms part of one’s internal geography and where particular buildings matter because particular events happened inside them. It is where the woman in the coffee shop knows what one orders and where a walk through the city is also a walk through one’s own past. Leaving can therefore cure the loneliness of danger while creating the loneliness of exile. A Ukrainian refugee surrounded by millions of people in a prosperous European capital may sometimes feel more alone than a person sitting by himself during an air raid in Lviv.

There is also a moral hesitation about admitting loneliness or unhappiness when other people are suffering more. A resident of Lviv knows that life in Kharkiv, Kherson, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia and settlements closer to the front can be vastly more dangerous. A civilian knows that a soldier in a trench is experiencing something incomparably worse. Somebody whose apartment windows were shattered knows that another family lost its home. Somebody who lost a friend knows another person who lost a husband or a child. War creates a hierarchy of suffering in which almost everyone can identify somebody who has suffered more.

The consequence is another form of silence. People say they are fine. “Fine” becomes one of the indispensable words of wartime life. How was the night? Fine. Was that explosion close? Not particularly. Are you frightened? No. How are you managing? Fine. These answers are not necessarily dishonest. Human beings really do adapt. But they can also become a method by which people conceal exhaustion from one another because acknowledging it seems self-indulgent when somebody else has endured something worse.

Yet the paradox of wartime loneliness is that war simultaneously produces an unusual kind of solidarity. People who have lived through the same conflict understand things about one another that need never be articulated. A distant explosion interrupts dinner and everyone stops talking for half a second before continuing. An air raid warning appears and nobody explains what it means. The electricity disappears and somebody reaches automatically for a torch. A person hears a particular sound in the sky and everyone in the room knows why he has suddenly stopped speaking.

These gestures constitute a language. People who share it may have nothing else in common. They may disagree about politics, religion, money or almost everything else. Nevertheless, they possess a common fragment of experience that cannot easily be reproduced outside the country. This is why wartime cities can feel simultaneously extraordinarily lonely and extraordinarily intimate. Everyone is carrying something. Everyone has lost something. Almost everyone knows somebody who has left and many know somebody who has died. Because these facts are ubiquitous, they frequently need no explanation.

Eventually this war will end. Ukraine will rebuild. Families will reunite, soldiers will return, airports will reopen and the strange administrative and psychological machinery of wartime existence will gradually be dismantled. Yet it would be naïve to imagine that the loneliness will disappear at the same moment. Peace does not restore the people who died, automatically repair relationships fragmented across continents or return years that have been consumed by waiting. Nor does it immediately remove the habits by which people learned to survive.

Some people may continue waking when a motorcycle passes because its engine resembles a drone. Some may continue keeping telephones fully charged and power banks beside the bed. Some will automatically identify the safest part of an unfamiliar building. Some will discover that complete silence feels unsettling. Some veterans may find civilian conversations impossibly trivial and some civilians who remained throughout the war may discover that friends who spent those years abroad cannot entirely understand the people they have become.

Perhaps some will even miss aspects of wartime solidarity. This sounds perverse until one understands that extreme circumstances can create forms of human closeness that ordinary life rarely reproduces. Nobody will miss the missiles, funerals, fear or destruction. Yet people may miss the intensity with which strangers helped one another, the immediate understanding between those who shared danger and the sense that certain things mattered absolutely while much of the nonsense of ordinary life did not matter at all.

This is the final paradox of loneliness in a war zone. War separates people. It scatters families across continents, destroys communities, transforms friendships and creates an experiential gulf between those who live through it and those who watch from afar. At the same time, war binds together those who remain through a shared vocabulary of experiences that frequently require no words at all.

One sits alone at night and the siren sounds. Across the city thousands of telephones sound the same warning. Lights appear behind curtains. People wake children, check messages, put on clothes, make tea, curse, pray or simply turn over and try to sleep. Somewhere an air defence crew is watching a screen. Somewhere a doctor is continuing an operation. Somewhere a railway employee is keeping a train moving. Somewhere a soldier is awake for reasons altogether more dangerous.

The person sitting in the dark apartment may be lonely. Indeed he may be more lonely than he has ever been in his life. But he is not alone in what he is experiencing. Millions of other people inhabit the same strange psychological territory, suspended between ordinary life and catastrophe, between exhaustion and endurance, between wanting to escape and refusing to leave.

Perhaps this distinction — between being lonely and being alone — is one of the things that makes it possible to remain.