This is the text of a video essay I edited a few days ago. You can watch the video form of this below, or here.
I’ve been thinking about how I interact with the Internet, lately. For a long time I’ve known it wasn’t healthy, even if I was connecting with people that I held dear and hadn’t fallen down the short-form video “content” hole a lot of people have. I’ve been wanting to disconnect more. Get control of my mind back. A start to that was going for a walk today. It’s bitter cold, but I was drawn to do this. I needed it. I’m lucky enough to live a short walk away from a little trail around a lake.
The first thing I found was a fishing bobber in a tree. The lake has been frozen over for weeks, and as far as I could see there were no holes dug into it. I don’t even think this lake is natural, and it’s tiny. I don’t know what horrors could have been fished from its depths. It almost felt like someone had gone fishing for this tree, but it hadn’t yet taken the bait. Maybe it never would. Trees aren’t often the type.
I happened by some kind of evergreen sapling a little ways down the trail. It trembled and shivered in the wind in a familiar way. I wonder how the sun feels on one’s needles. I wonder if this tree feels the cold like we do. Does it feel the pain in its teeth when it’s below freezing? Do its fingertips turn blue?
There were some birds around. They chirped, rebellious against the snow and dead wood. Alive. I’m not sure I’m alive in the same way this forest is. All history, and footprints, and ancient bark, and freezing sap. I want to be a home for smaller things. These woods breathe along with them, I think, even surrounded by urbanism. A few miles away is the largest city in New England. It seems to loom over this place, threatening to choke it.
Even deep in, the city seems to stretch itself into these woods. Signs are put up, labeling the trails made decades or maybe centuries before. This was all natural once. All trees. It feels like it’s just as likely I’ll happen by an “elder” or a runner as a farmer or shepherd. It’s so like us to impose this over nature. To attempt to categorize, organize it. I feel so disconnected out here, and yet… I yearn to be even further. I yearn to be away from human touch.
There are some benches out here, and that would be nice but most of them are examples of hostile architecture – the bar in the middle prohibiting someone from laying down to sleep. They make me think of all the ways in which we’ve failed this earth, and each other. In a world without the assault of advertising, and the scourge of social media, and the ever-growing attention economy I think we’d be more empathetic. For all this connection, constant and worldwide, our relationships seem to be so… Untrusting. Like a park bench, provided freely, but under lock and chain.
As I’m writing this I feel the pull of Facebook and YouTube. My head feels so silent, my headphones threateningly quiet. I’m understimulated. I think spending time this way is good for me. I don’t need to be stimulated all the time. There’s an irony to this – interacting with this short hike through my phone’s camera. I think of it like a baby step in the right direction. Maybe I should get a camcorder.
In an attempt to decouple at least partly from the future that is streaming from the cloud, I’ve gotten an MP3 player. It’s an Innioasis Y1, if you were curious. Sort of a modern iPod. I like it a lot. Gives me more ways to not have my face buried in my phone. Granted, it’s another screen but I can do something else while it plays, like read a book or something. If I were listening to music from my phone I’d likely be scrolling. It’s better to have a device that does one thing instead of everything, I’ve learned.
I’ve been listening to lots of music older than me, and finding things to appreciate about it. Today it was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie.
I found this beautiful archway formed naturally by the trees. It felt like a portal to another world. If I walked under it, I was pretty sure I’d be kidnapped by faeries, or maybe David Bowie.
There were some berries in the woods too. The birds were surely appreciating them. They were tiny, and beautiful. I’m sure that if I’d put them through Google Lens it would have told me that not only would they kill me, it would hurt the whole time I was dying. I decided to let myself be curious, and alive. Maybe those two are the same thing. Maybe having every answer to every question ever asked isn’t a good thing.
I don’t think I’m saying anything terribly original here. Social media bad, phones bad, water is wet and the Pope is Catholic. I just wanted to make something new for once. Maybe originality shouldn’t be the be-all, and end-all. The current obsession of the tech world certainly doesn’t think so – everything it makes is a soulless copy of everything it’s been fed. Like a cancer cell, created at the moment of division, only when things go very wrong. I hope that this isn’t like that.
At about the deepest point into the woods that I got, I came across a rock wall built Gods know how long ago. Humans have always been here, making their mark on things. We don’t need to disrupt or grow or tear down in order to say, “I was here.” We can make beautiful things all ourselves.
Just out of sight when I first found the rock wall, there was a staircase arranged into it. It went up to nowhere. Just more brush, more woods, more snow. It may have led somewhere once. A lot of my thoughts as I navigate this “digital detox” feel a bit like this staircase. I need to retread these paths again without the veritable IV drip of stimulation that I used to have. Remake those neuron connections. It’s hard work.
I came across a tree covered in lichen and ivy. It bent its way into the trail toward me, and every other person who had walked this trail, but this time it was toward me. The bark was so variable, so fascinating once I stopped to admire it. I had to touch it. Watching my hand reach out, I very quickly became aware of my chipped nail polish, and my fingers covered in grime from a crafting project, itself another attempt at decoupling from the internet wasteland. I thought this clip was a lot longer. It felt longer.
It was around this time that I turned back toward home. I came to a point in the trail where a massive apartment building loomed just on the other side of the woods. There was a gray squirrel bouncing around the fallen trees. I had to check my phone’s map at two points along my journey back to ensure I was going the right way. I don’t think my poor sense of direction alone is to blame for that. If I were more present, more with-it, more aware in general I probably could have gotten home okay without it. My brain screamed for more, more, more stimulation – a single scroll, one video, a voice call with a friend, one round of a video game. I purged all the games from my phone last week. I’ve been thinking about getting a flip phone.
Some church bells tolled out over the woods from the city as I approached my neighborhood again.
Like I said, I don’t think I’m saying anything new. I don’t have any grand realizations or conclusions to draw from all of this beyond, “Nature is good to be in sometimes,” and “I’ve been feeling challenged to leave the Internet world behind lately.” I’ve grown to be more okay with being hard to reach. To let notifications go unread until I’m more ready for them. I want to get control of my attention span back and this is a part of how I’m planning to do it. I think that 2026 is going to be the year I get control of my mind back. If you’ve been feeling similarly, I hope that you can come along on this journey with me.
I think I’m going to try journaling more. Leaving my phone at home when I can. Spending more time creating, even when I don’t think I can do it well. And creating for me, not anyone else. I want to spend more time out in nature, too. I think that’ll be good for me.
For now, though, I think I’ve got to get home.