Touch Grass
I dictated this while driving thru Big Basin.
It was written through the lens of eventually posting on Instagram. It’s not necessarily well written (or well dictated). It’s raw. It’s real.
NOTHING BEATS THE REAL THING
Looking back at these photos will be great, but nothing beats the real thing. Social media is good and bad because while you can find a lot of helpful and good content it displays the underbelly, overall shit of society, and now AI slop more easily than ever before. Never before have we been able to flick a finger and go from seeing a dog surfing to someone being beheaded in a second. It flattens our emotional response to everything. And right beneath our noses they’ve slipped in nothing but ads ads ads. All they want us to do is consume consume consume. Even consume someone else’s ideas. Or buy what they recommend. And then what we buy ends up owning us.
It’s no longer about connection. It’s no longer about actually experiencing something real. Nothing beats the real thing. We’re spending more time on the phone looking at nothing that gives us nothing. Phones no longer make just calls. In fact our phones are now the worst at making calls. Everything in our lives is becoming more digital and automated and AI is just accelerating that 100 times faster than ever before. And it’s making us experience “life” through a screen versus the real thing. We’re losing more than we’ll ever know.
We’re being persuaded more easily than ever before. Do we really think our current world view and perspective is our own? Critical thinking is out the window as we’re fed stories and clips to make us feel a certain way because emotion is the greatest persuader. We think we have the facts but they’re simply serving us bite-size clips that don’t really mean anything other than what the creator wants us to think. There’s somehow not enough empathy in the world but at the same time there’s somehow too much. It doesn’t make sense.
Real journalism is dead. There’s no independent perspective and we’re totally losing any semblance of what real experiences are. We divided ourselves through short form social media and it’s ironic that this is on social media but maybe it’s a way of claiming some independence back on the platform that wants us to stay on it for hours every day. The irony is we’re all trapped in the same system I’m critiquing. This very app is still what people prefer to “connect” on. But now and tomorrow and forever nothing will beat the real thing. Touching grass is a silly but legit term. This is all really a reminder to myself but I’m having these thoughts while driving and had to get them down. There’s so much good in the world but now so little to none of it is happening on these attention-sucking machines (apps) where we’re the product.
