Let’s talk about the ocean. It used to be a place where you went to fish or swim or just look at the horizon and forget how terrible your life is. But because humans ruin everything we touch, the Black Sea is now a giant trash can filled with explosives.

There is a story out there right now about divers. These aren’t the guys you see on vacation looking at colorful fish. These are men who have to put on heavy suits, jump into freezing cold water, and look for metal balls that want to kill them. They are clearing mines. Russian mines. Ukrainian waters. It doesn’t really matter whose name is stamped on the metal. A bomb is a bomb. It does not care about your politics. It just waits.

Think about the absolute stupidity of this situation. We spend millions of dollars to build these mines. We pay people in factories to make them perfect. We design them to sit quietly in the dark, underwater, waiting for a ship or a person to get too close. Then, we throw them into the sea like we are tossing coins into a fountain. And now? Now we have to find brave men to go down there and clean it up. It is the cycle of human life. We make a mess. We break things. Then we beg someone else to fix it.

These divers are down there right now. It is quiet. It is dark. They can’t see much. One wrong move, and that’s it. There is no second chance. You don’t get to say “oops” when you are dealing with a sea mine. If you make a mistake, you turn into a memory. And for what? So that some politicians can draw lines on a map? So that the grain ships can move again and make rich people richer?

The water is murky. Visibility is bad. Imagine doing your job with a blindfold on, and if you trip, the building explodes. That is their Tuesday. That is their Wednesday. Every single day, they wake up, drink their coffee, and go swim with death. They have to be calm. You can’t panic underwater. If you panic, you die. So they have to be ice cold, just like the water.

Meanwhile, the people who started this war are sitting in warm offices. They are wearing expensive suits. They are eating lunches that cost more than your car. They talk about strategy. They talk about honor. They talk about victory. Do they know what a mine looks like up close? Do they know what it feels like to wonder if your next breath is your last? No. Of course not. They send the divers. They send the working class to clean up the garbage they threw on the floor.

It makes you sick if you think about it too long. The sea should be peaceful. It should be the one place where the noise of the world doesn’t reach. But we couldn’t leave it alone. We had to drag our wars into the water. We had to plant seeds of death in the sand. And the worst part is that these mines will be there for a long time. Even if the war ends tomorrow. Even if everyone shakes hands and smiles for the cameras. The mines don't sign peace treaties. They stay down there. They wait.

Years from now, long after the news cameras have moved on to the next disaster, someone will still have to go down there. They will still have to search the gloom. This job isn’t going away. It is job security, I guess. But it is the worst kind of job security in the world.

Look at the rest of us. We complain when the Wi-Fi is slow. We get mad when our coffee is cold. We think we have problems. But we aren't swimming in the dark looking for a metal monster that wants to rip us apart. We have it easy. We are soft. These guys are doing the real work. The dirty work. The dangerous work. And they do it while the rest of the world argues about nonsense.

This is the reality of our species. We are really good at breaking things. We are experts at making life dangerous. But we are very slow at fixing things. It takes a few seconds to drop a mine into the water. It takes hours, days, sometimes years to get it out safely. The math doesn’t add up. It never adds up.

So, spare a thought for the guys in the wetsuits. They are the janitors of war. They are cleaning up a mess they didn't make. And they are doing it in the cold, dark silence, hoping that today isn't the day their luck runs out.