In Praise of Touching Grass

I woke up this morning and chose anxiety. I have come to realize these past few years, that I do not like who I am when I interact with social media. My attention span shortens, my mood darkens, and most importantly the deluge of information about all the ways in which our world is crumbling around us triggers an existential crisis that seems to start and end with nihilism. As a result, I’ve been quite deliberate about trimming out social media from my life, ranging from setting timers to timebox app use to deleting my accounts. Inexplicably, this morning I started scrolling and during what could only be described as an out of body experience, I watched myself mindlessly consume content from the internet and feel a whole range of extreme emotions from joy to to outrage to despair. Some rational part of my brain banged on the door of the control room to my fingers and eyes to no avail. Rationality did prevail eventually and I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air to finally start my day on a positive note.

Introspecting on our relationship to the digital world is hard, but could not be more opportune. It seems like the parasocial nature of our relationship to the digital has accelerated at an alarming rate escalating from relationships with other humans to relationships with bots. “Touch grass” is a quippy way to tell people on the internet to shut down their devices, go outside, and literally and figuratively touch grass: experience the outdoors, get some sunshine, and more importantly engage with reality.

We live in a world that would have us believe that there is a digital substitute for everything that we could possibly experience in the real world. Have a problem? There’s an app for that. The root of the issue is when we begin to see the digital world as a substitute for reality rather than a tool to enhance it. As a runner I constantly gaslight myself as to whether I really exercised if my GPS watch didn’t adequately record it. I’ll ask my mom how she slept, and she’ll look at her sleep score. The digital marketplace knows you and your preferences, you claim, better than you do. The digitization of everything means reducing our lives into streams of ones and zeros in an endless cycle of streaming, processing, and serving.

The truth of the matter is that the digital world is a tool and a poor substitute for reality. The digital world is not real. It’s a curated and often manipulated stream of information that takes reduces you to a peripheral of an alternate reality. Digital interaction sanitizes the world to mostly visual stimulus with limited audio and tactile interaction. It does not require you to engage with it or think critically. This digital world is numbing and it’s dangerous. There are countless ways that falsities are injected into this reality and harm those who engage with it in earnest.

On the other hand, humans are the medium through with reality is created. Our physical senses perceive the world and our brains build a rich model of the emotions we feel and the time and space that we occupy. Digital interaction replaces this perception in a way that makes it quite easy to mistake it for the real world. The best lies are wrapped in truth. I believe the core of our humanity is in the way we perceive and process our world and in turn interact with it, making the digital overlay that we’ve created a black hole that threatens to suck away the very thing that makes us human. Instead of being a medium for your own perceptions, it turns your mind into a channel for the feelings and goals of others and leaves your body to behind to decay. As I scrolled, the emotions I felt were not my own. They were echoes of the emotions of others.

In the end, digitization and the internet are more nuanced topics than I’ve made them out to be. These ideas stem from a realization that if we are not deliberate about how we engage with reality, we leave ourselves open to the influence of others, and not always in a good way. There are legitimate ways that digital spaces have made the world a better place in terms of access to information, services, and livelihood. The solution to all of this won’t be to completely abandon what we built. Perhaps it is to recognize its place as a tool with a specific purpose instead of a way of life. The digital world should be a witness to reality not a substitute for it.

And that is the beauty of of stepping outside: a reminder that the real world awaits, that we exist in four dimensions, that at least for an instant of quiet, the world is not crumbling around us. Smell the roses, breathe, go touch grass.