"Watching is the least I can do"

There's a moral feeling tied up in all this, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Terrible things are happening to people. You're safe and comfortable. To look away feels like a small betrayal, as though the decent response to suffering is at least to witness it. If people are living through a war, you feel you can at least read about it.

I respect the impulse. It comes from conscience. Wanting to help is right, but watching isn't a way of doing it.

Ask what your attention does for the people in the story. A family sheltering in a basement isn't made safer, warmer or less afraid by your reading the live page for the sixth time today. Nobody in the story knows that you're watching. Your distress on their behalf, however real, never reaches them. The feeling that attention is a form of solidarity is sincere, but nothing passes from you to them.

What does reach people is money, time, votes and voices. A donation to an organisation working in the area does something. A standing order does more, because relief agencies can plan around steady income. A letter to your MP does a little, and more if many people write. Volunteering for a local charity that helps refugees or the homeless does a great deal for a few people. Hosting, fostering, mentoring, giving blood, serving as a school governor or a trustee are all ways in which a private citizen can make some part of the world better. All of them have a cost in time and attention, and you have a limited supply of both.

This is where heavy checking works against your conscience. It uses up the hours and the emotional energy that action would need. An evening spent absorbing four crises leaves you drained and low, with a sense that everything is hopeless, and that's a poor state in which to do anything. People in that state rarely get round to setting up the standing order. It's my interpretation and not a research finding, but I think the checking habit takes a fund of real goodwill and spends it on feeling bad.

The news also presents so many causes, so briefly, that none of them gets your sustained concern. There's a famine one week, an earthquake the next, and a scandal after that. Each one produces a jolt of sympathy, and then the next story replaces it. Someone who picks one or two causes and sticks with them for years, learning about them and giving to them regularly, does far more good than someone who feels terrible about forty.

So here's a suggestion that I think honours the impulse better than watching does. Choose one or two things in the world that you care about most. Find out which organisations do good work on them. Give them something regular, whether money or time. Follow those subjects properly, through the organisations' own reports and the occasional long article. Then, when the feeling comes that you ought to be paying attention to the suffering in the world, you'll know you're already doing something that reaches some of it. That's more than looking away, and more than the live page.