September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy

I am a Pole. My country borders Europe’s largest war since 1945, heats itself with coal and imported gas, and arms itself on borrowed money. From here the news does not arrive as separate stories.

Every generation believes it is living through the end of something. What is different in 2026 is that the crises have stopped arriving one at a time. A war in the Gulf becomes the price of my diesel, smaller harvests from Sudan to Yemen and a half-empty gas cavern in Bavaria.

The world is not ending. But for thirty years we swapped buffers for dependencies, because a supplier is cheaper than a stockpile and a guarantee is cheaper than an army. When a dependency failed, we did not rebuild the buffer. We found another dependency. Every swap worked for as long as the thing at the other end was there. This year, several of those things were tested together.