We all need to touch grass

Out of the matrix and onto the beach. Or, taking advice from the internet to get the F off the internet

Nov 18, 2024

From my extensive sociological research on TikTok (read: my borderline addiction), I’ve picked up a few slang phrases from the Gen Z youths. I won’t embarrass myself—or you—by trying to use “bussin” in a sentence, but I will say my favorite so far is “you need to touch some grass,” or simply, “touch grass.”

This phrase is often directed at someone who has completely lost themselves in the dramas and conspiracies of the internet, and they need to come up for air ASAP. It’s saying: put your phone on airplane mode, walk yourself outside, and—yes, literally—go touch some grass to reconnect with a more grounded sense of reality.

Honestly? It’s excellent advice—and one I desperately needed to follow this past week.

multicolored hallway — Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash

Sometimes I envision the internet as an otherworldly dreamland—an immaterial, fantasy realm that hovers somewhere between our minds and the clouds overhead. Like a dream, it’s real in the sense that it exists and impacts us, yet it is also vaporous, an intangible dimension we can’t physically touch or fully grasp. Just as dreams borrow from our waking lives, weaving fragments of memory, fear, and fantasy, the internet is also just an echo of reality.

It’s a place where we’re all playing a kind of pretend—we can be fully ourselves there, but we can also create personas that enhance, distort, or detach from our actual selves (think random anonymous commenters, idealized Instagram highlight reels, elaborate catfishing schemes, and everything in between).

We have the option to tune in or opt out, engaging with it as much or as little as we choose. But in reality, it’s not entirely in our control. The internet often feels like a haunted amusement park, with flashing neon billboards (advertisers, the attention economy) and distorted, menacing clowns (the click-bait outrage machine) luring us in and trapping us in its chaotic frenzy.

This world is transparent—we can see through it. It’s there, but is it really?

Glitch in the matrix // CreatedByKiersten on Etsy

Additionally, our digital world is, quite literally, what we make it. Each of us are living in our own finely-curated cyber-realities. What we choose to follow, watch, read, and subscribe to builds our individualized world, brick by endless-scroll brick.

These are the digital neighborhoods we each live, work, and play in, and they’ve become the echo-chamber bubbles we know all too well. These fantasy neighborhoods are exaggerated, warped projections of reality. They’re fragmented, polarized, and dominated by the loudest, most extreme voices. Outrage isn’t just amplified—it’s rewarded.

They pull us deeper into insularity without our consent.

They are distorted funhouse mirrors, a frosted-glass mirage, a pixelated fever dream!

And so, I must, at certain times in my life, get outside and touch some fucking grass.

Thankfully, this seems to be my natural impulse. The day after the election, I found myself daze-walking with the baby to the lake in Prospect Park, drifting down the street in a vertigo cloud of shock, confusion, sadness, curious bemusement, and shame. I don’t even remember deciding to walk there… my feet just started moving and didn’t stop until we reached the water’s edge.

The world shifted under my feet, again, so I walked to the lake to try to feel grounded, again.

I kept thinking: I can’t believe I let myself get trapped in the same stupid bubble again. In the final week before the election, I found myself sinking into the clickbait swamp of the news cycle I usually try so hard to avoid. My final prediction had been that Kamala would win—and win big. LOL. When the results came back and he won again, even more decisively than the first time (popular vote! swing states!), I saw actual stars.

Oh no, I thought. It’s happened again. Not just that he won again—though there was that, too—but the deeper realization that I had been so unaware, so wrong, so wildly off the mark. It is intensely disorienting to find yourself so out of step with reality, so completely dumbfounded by what has just unfolded.

I sat quietly, watching the natural world dance around me, my thoughts skipping like stones across the lake. That’s when the image of the pale blue dot came to mind. As my gaze softened over the water, my mind zoomed outward to that “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” I felt a wave of palpable relief remembering how small and insignificant we are, how excruciatingly brief our time on this planet is. Cosmic therapy at its finest.

Memories flooded in. I thought about all the other times I’d felt this way—when my understanding of the world shifted in an instant. The 2004 and 2016 elections, yes, but also everything else: 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, COVID, 10/7, the fall of Roe. When has life ever been calm and what I had been told to expect??

I’ve been here before, I reminded myself. I’ve been here before, in this incredulous place, doubting the sun would ever rise again—but it did, and it did, and it does.

I refocused back on earth and took in its beauty: the sunshine, the lake, the trees, the birds, my baby, the breeze.

I have precedent now. I have perspective now. I floated to the lake in a daze, but I left walking on solid ground. Thank you, Prospect Park Lake. I needed that chat.

To double down on my touch-grass campaign, we booked a last minute weekend escape to a charming beach town on the southeastern coast of Long Island. We declared this a family retreat—our code word for a purposefully low-tech trip, with explicit intentions set for us to just chill and hang together, reflect, and recharge—and ohh, did we pick a good spot for it. There’s nothing quite like the magic of the beach in the off-season: the bright sun, the choppy waves, the crisp wind, that expansive horizon.

We took a long (for kids) hike in the morning, then explored Fire Island in the afternoon. The big boy rolled in the sand, played catch, and flew a kite, while the baby, nestled in the carrier, laughed into the whipping wind. The black-and-white beauty of a lighthouse was forever in view.

We left the island feeling grounded and rejuvenated, connected and calm—though, admittedly, that feeling faded during the 3+ hours of stop-and-go holiday traffic on the way back to the city, buuttt that’s not the point of this here essay.

This past week, I’ve been trying to stay balanced—skimming headlines, listening to a podcast or two, but not fully engaging. It feels like I’m taking sneak-peeks through my fingers, hesitant yet curious. I need to keep recalibrating, slowly finding new digital spaces and voices to help diversify my intakes, to try, again, to not be so blindsided by events, and to empathize, again, with perspectives outside of my own.

But honestly, touching grass is way more appealing right now. Also appealing? My overflowing stack of books. For now, I’d much rather lose myself in the fictional worlds created by talented authors than get lost in the haunted cyber-carnival that is the internet.

(( In case you’re curious: I just finished The Glow by Jessie Gaynor and loved it. It’s a clever, funny satire set in a Goop-like wellness cult. I recommend! Next up for me is Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery, which I stumbled upon at the library. It’s about a girl in the 1960s who gets hired as a typist for Andy Warhol, where she embarks on a “surreal adventure at the fringes of the countercultural movement.” Ok!! Sounds good to me!! I also have on deck Heavy Hitter by Katie Cotugno about a pop star falling in love with a professional athlete (iykyk) and Slenderman by Kathleen Hale, but that might be too scary for me. We’ll see! ))

As we head into the cold, dark winter—and this ~new American era~ for better or for worse—I’m keeping in mind my favorite Gen Z slang that doubles as solid advice: get offline and touch some grass ✌️🌀🌱✨

How about you? What are your thoughts? Let’s chat in the comments if you’d like—and as always, thank you so much for reading!