We Shouldn't Need a Meme to Remind Us What's Real and What's Fake (Part One)
If Digital Life Feels Increasingly Unreal... That's Because It Is
This essay is a meandering, tortuous (although hopefully not torturous), two-part exploration through a series of interrelated-yet-disconnected topics that all bear in some way upon the themes of digital technology, modern life, and the real (as opposed to the false). If it strikes you as filled with digressions and strangeness, that is because digital life is – the internet (which appears to be in some stage of metamorphosis between a worldwide web and a metaverse, yet still bears the almost-anachronistic moniker of “internet” for a little while longer) is not a straightforward, logical place (beginning with the fact that it isn’t a real place and yet it isn’t entirely imaginary either) and our sojourns in (or through, or to) it aren’t linear. With that in mind, please read on.
Sometime in late winter of 2022, the “touch grass” meme came to my attention. The meme is an insult used towards someone who has so lost touch that they need to go outside and touch the grass for a reminder that reality still exists.
It makes some intuitive sense that if you were living in a virtual unworld, you might need to go outside and feel the grass to start feeling mentally and emotionally stable. Why? Because virtual life isn’t real. The human body wasn’t made for it and neither was the human mind. We can handle it, and even benefit from it,1 at small doses. But if you want to stay sane, you have to stay in touch with the physical world in which you live.
Fish Don’t Know They’re Wet:
I find the metaphor of fish not knowing what water is to be one of the more versatile and applicable metaphors in common parlance. It’s hard to recognize the sea you swim in for what it is, because you’re inside it.
Modern digital life is a prime example. Spend too much time online, and your definition of life narrows to “what people in my corner of the internet do.”2 Moreover, the platforms and media you use begin to shape your brain and your thoughts.
This has always been true: the human mind adapts to thinking in ways compatible with immediate experience. Put another way, your physical (and now digital) environment impacts how you think. Spend too much time on Twitter and you begin to think in short quips. Ditto for TikTok and videos. Listen to podcasts and you’ll begin to think conversationally.
I’m a visual person to some extent. I can close my eyes and see words I want to spell. If I spend time to memorize a poem, I can see the page it was printed on (even years later). And if I spend too much time on Twitter or Substack, I can close my eyes and “see” it – the layout and the color palate etc. You might not be a visual learner, but my guess is you’ve also noticed how digital communication sometimes shapes your thoughts.
All of this is to say, I first learned about “touch grass” in the course of reading some articles I stumbled across by digital fish who don’t know they’re wet. Occasionally, you read something by someone (or encounter someone in real life) who comes across as so untethered that their lack of touch with reality reaches through the screen and touches you. You reel and grapple and you have a hard time placing what they’re saying.
I’m not talking about conspiracy theories, but rather articles written by intelligent people with grandiose worldviews who can spin a complex narrative about a topic that is at once fascinating and slightly-off – but which confuses you and makes you struggle to wrap your head around what, precisely, is off. Outright conspiracy theories are easy to reject. But depictions of reality that have elements of truth to them, while bordering on the conspiratorial or warped, are much harder to reckon with.
You know what I’m talking about. If you’ve spent time on the internet, you’ve encountered someone with a theory about COVID-19, or political orders, or science and medicine, or mental health, or “what it means to be a human in 2022.”
Intelligent people can concoct grand narratives about how the internet hasn’t merely reshaped the way we conduct business and get our news, but has altered the reality of the universe in a way reminiscent to readers of The Crying of Lot 49. In short, that digital technology literally instantiated postmodernism into real life,3 such that nothing means anything anymore and it’s impossible to make sense of the world.
This is, to put it mildly, crazy. Insanity is actually the correct term here. At a certain level of oversaturation and overstimulation,4 the human mind cannot handle more information.5 A person starts to go a little insane. Or they come up with insane theories to explain why the world has gone insane and they are the sane ones who can see it.
I don’t merely mean a rise in internet conspiracies and people who live in their own, weird, balkanized internet communities. But more on that later.
Humans didn’t evolve for this kind of life. We’ve seen a rise in anxiety and depression, not just among young people (but especially among teenage girls). We’ve seen a strange rise in other mental health problems, narcissism, erosion of social norms and public trust, institutional decline, cultural upheaval, and political dysfunction. Now, digital technology isn’t the only factor at play in any of those. But it is a factor, and an important one. As I’ve written before, every new major technological revolution brought upheaval with it as human beings learned and adapted, and we’re still in the growing pains phase with the digital revolution.
It is the chronicling and categorizing of these growing pains with which I am concerned today. While a comprehensive list of articles and books written about “crises of meaning in the digital/internet age,” or cultural and technological upheaval in the 21st Century, or “why this moment really is different,” or “just what the hell is going on,” in the last twenty years would run in the thousands, this chronicling ranges from the completely mainstream to the outright conspiracy, to the odd denizens in the middle who posit various “grand unifying theories of the internet.” While this exercise is an important one, it comes with a hazard. One can get lost in too careful examination and begin to stray from the well-trodden paths of the mainstream analysts into the shadowy depths that run towards madness.
To illustrate that, let us take a momentary detour.
The Poison is Determined by the Dose:
Many things that are beneficial become poisonous at high doses: Tylenol, caffeine, sodium, iron, zinc, and even water. And many other things that have insignificant harm at small doses become toxic at high doses – the best example being alcohol.
You may have heard that “sitting is the new smoking.” Now, this statement isn’t literally true and oversells the harms of sitting. But let’s posit that sitting in a chair is dose-dependent – it can be beneficial or neutral at small doses, and mildly harmful at high doses. Should we worry?
The question becomes, “how large is the dose?” Have you ever added up the amount of time you sit on a given day: in the office, in meetings, on the commute, in the lobby, at meals, watching tv, playing on your phone, reading? How much are you really getting? For most people, the average is probably 8-12 hours, with only occasional 6-hour days on the low end. Even if sitting is only mildly harmful, that would still likely be an overdose amount almost every day, for three hundred to three-hundred-and-sixty-five days a year.
Is a similar statement not also true for many people for, say, time spent indoors,6 certain processed foods, or staring at a screen? While they may not be “bad for you,” in normal quantities, we may not be getting normal quantities, especially when averaged over time.
Let’s look at another example.
It’s well-known that calorie-restriction increases lifespan in rodents and monkeys and probably humans, which has led members of the Calorie-Restriction Society to voluntarily undereat for years in the hopes of extending their lives. However, other research has shown that periods of fasting, followed by periods of eating normally,7 is the best way to restrict calories in mice and monkeys if the goal is longevity and long-term health. But yet other research has called these findings into question. It turns out the quality of diet (and lifestyle) also mattered – the rodents and monkeys were eating a highly processed diet. Animals eating the food they would eat in the wild did not appear to experience the same longevity benefits from fasting and caloric-deprivation.8 Put another way, the poor diets, frequent feeding, calorie-surpluses, and cage-life were artificially shortening the lives of monkeys and mice.
So, that proves that fasting is only important if we live in cages and eat highly unnatural food, right? Doesn’t that mean there’s nothing to worry about?
Right?
Well, if we’re being honest about the question of whether our lives more closely resemble that of the wild mice, or the mice in the care, we might feel more than a little worried.9
Living in Digital Cages:10
There’s a lot of weird stuff on the Internet. If you go too deep into some of the stranger corners, you can get sullied yourself if you aren’t careful. If you spend too much time there, a little bit of the weirdness rubs off on you.
But it doesn’t help that our lives are so evolutionarily odd. We are fish out of water – the sea we swim in isn’t the sea we were born to swim in. If we’re physically and mentally unhealthy – because we live sedentary indoor lives, eat unnatural diets, and spend all our time on screens – that only makes us more susceptible to the weirdness on the Internet. The more the digital world dominates your life, the more bits of it actually feel “real” to you. And the less healthy you are in the real world, the easier it is to lose touch with reality when you go down the digital rabbit hole.
As we will see later in our journey, living a real life (going outside, getting exercise, talking to people in the real world, limiting screen time, eating somewhat normal food, sleeping enough, etc.) isn’t a panacea against the weirdness. But it does inure you to some of it. You still need to be careful – some of the weird stuff is really weird. But if you live a real life, whenever you feel too lost after reading some Reddit thread or random blog, you can snap out of it. You close your computer, go get some physical activity, and remember what’s real and what isn’t.
Some people who live too much in self-constructed digital cages begin to seriously think that the internet is the real world. These are the people who tell us that Dave Chappelle was wrong: “Twitter really is a real place.” These people spend so much time online that lines begin to blur, not just between work-life and home-life but between digital and physical.
But (pardon my French), no matter how much time you spend on screens, you still eat and shit in the real world. Even in Ready Player One, the characters had to “return” to the physical world to take care of their business.
Is It Really That Bad?
If you’ve read this far (or if you’ve read some other things I’ve written) you’ll know that I’m skeptical of digital technology, but not reactionary about it. It annoys me that a kind of guilt-by-association confers upon critics of social media and smartphones, wherein those raising legitimate points (such as Jonathan Haidt) are sometimes accused of Luddism. This is a logical fallacy akin to accusing anyone who doesn’t like both universities and airports of being similar to the Unabomber.11
There is a vast gulf between Jonathan Haidt and reactionaryism – which includes within it a variety of flavors, ranging from the “life was better in the Middle Ages” crowd to the “waiting for civilization to collapse so we can finally return to the Stone Age” crowd. (Yes, there are people who believe both of those.)
There is a difference between arguing that social media causes anxiety and depression in teenage girls and making the case for feudalism. Among traditionalists worried about the social upheaval brought on by digital technology, there is a vast difference between those worried about a breakdown in cultural norms, and those worried about a literal breakdown in meaning and narrative (the latter group mostly comprised of “very online” people – i.e., people whose lives are super virtual).
Sometimes, observers are too close to their source. There are populist critics of class divides, who spend lots of digital ink about rifts between those with physical jobs and those with desk jobs, who themselves live intensely non-physical, urban, upscale, online lives.
Which brings me, in a way, to the topic I foreshadowed at the beginning: digital reality. Why all the lead up? I needed to go through the topics I did to arrive at my central observation, which I’ve hinted at and which you’ll learn in a moment. I needed to mention the very real concerns of Jonathan Haidt and others, in order to arrive at the edge. The edge of what? The edge of the weird.12 If the internet were Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, this would be the Dungeon Dimensions.
The ”touch grass” meme is only necessary or relevant for people who have difficulty distinguishing between the digital and the non-digital. I intentionally used what I believe to be an oxymoron, “digital reality,” because I’m convinced that a belief that this exists (i.e., that, in some sense, social media is just as real as a tree or a chair) lies at the crux of the weirdness.
This premise is shared by an eclectic ideological cast: “rad-trad” post-liberals (i.e., cultural critics so hyperventilated about the postmodern nature of digital life in the 2020s that they’re ready to scrap liberalism for some kind of nationalist or hierarchical theocracy with de jure “shared cultural values”), conspiratorial anti-globalists, woke young folks who use phrases like “meat suit” and “time is a social construct,” and many that are harder to place (for instance, the anti-capitalist-environmentalist-turned-mystical-ultraordodox-Christian Paul Kingsnorth, who seems a prime example of horseshoe theory in practice).13
Those on the right are intensely worried about metanarratives and a loss of shared meaning, but I wonder if they realize that – for all they criticize digital life – they’re too plugged into it. If you boil down some of the reactionary criticisms by a factor of 11, sometimes they have a point, but maybe what they really need to do is unplug and go outside.
On the other side, you have people who increasingly seem to think that physical biology is meaningless and interacting in the physical world is passe – who argue that self-definition has no physical component, that affinity equals identity, and that there is no truth (only narratives and words to be deconstructed).
In other words, we have one side lamenting digital postmodernism and the other side embracing it fully. But both accept it as a starting premise. For all they seem to hate postmodernism, those lamenting the breakdown in metanarratives and the increasing meaninglessness of the world basically accept fundamental tenets of postmodernism (ex., that it’s possible for the world to literally stop making sense). For all they seem to hate modern technology, the more conspiratorial among the rad-trad crowd seem to have gone mad from living indoors and staring at screens all day.
Note that, while I’m focusing on a narrow slice (although it may not feel like that), there is clearly a larger phenomenon that tracks with this. Across Western society, we see examples of public figures who start out normal and appear to go mildly insane (figuratively, at least), after becoming “very online” especially if they’re focused heavily on polarizing topics (and/or they have a large group of haters). The “losing their minds” phenomenon seemed especially common during the COVID-19 pandemic, but clearly it is still going on. It’s especially prevalent among those who start offering public opinions on areas well outside of their expertise, ranging from the offensive (Scott Adams) to the mildly controversial (Jordan Peterson) to the COVID vaccine-and-or-ivermectin truther (Bret Weinstein, Alex Berenson).
Celebrity has always had this hazard, as evidenced by Princess Di and Michael Jackson, but today everybody has an equal opportunity to become corrupted by attention. Some have suggested a virus-like social contagion with a digital component, and I find this an interesting possibility. While I don’t actually think conspiracy theories are really any more prevalent or powerful today (human beings have always been deeply superstitious), I am quite open to the possibility that insanity is contagious and can transfer through osmotic screens.14
Read Part Two.
Among other things, the digital world has revolutionized communication across long distances, facilitated faster and easier transactions, and led to increased dematerialization – meaning that we can accomplish more while using less (increasing economic growth while reducing environmental impact).
Granted, humans have always been pretty good at defining “normal” to mean “what I and people I know do.”
As opposed to when postmodernism was just a set of philosophical ideas and weird books.
Constant dopamine hits from social media and porn and video games, without any “down time” (i.e., time when dopamine isn’t being triggered – ideally time spent completely unplugged, with zero artificial stimulation apart from the physical world).
Theoretically, there is a limit to the amount of information a person can reasonably take in and digest in a given day, and it’s hard to do both at the same time. I doubt it’s a hard limit, fixed for each person. It probably fluctuates daily, but it seems obvious that the more information you consume, the harder you find it to process all of it, and you probably get the feeling that you need to “take a break.” At some level, you can “power through,” but ultimately even the most mentally-agile brain gets overloaded and feels overwhelming loss of concentration. If you’ve ever read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, you’re probably familiar with this idea.
By which I mean: lack of time spent outdoors.
In other words, the benefit can be achieved by polarizing the calorie-restriction: restricting caloric intake to zero for a defined period, and not restricting calories at all most days. This should be good news, because chronically eating at a caloric deficit (i.e., 30% below BMR every day for life) can significantly impede quality of life and other metrics of health (muscle mass, etc.).
Of course, in the wild, many animals encounter periods of fasting and calorie-restriction naturally during the course of their lifespans when there isn’t any food to eat. They are also moving more and living in a very different environment than their lab counterparts.
That isn’t a reactionary statement. I think it’s perfectly reasonable, and in fact valuable, for those who are on the side of technological civilization to ask hard questions about technology and civilization. Obviously, everything comes with a downside, but downsides can be dealt with if we are honest about them. And just because we use technology in one way doesn’t necessarily mean that is the way we should be using it. Or to put it another way, there could always be a better way to use technology that eliminates or mitigates the downside. Asking hard questions about technological civilization is the only way to improve it. Reasonable people can’t leave legitimate criticisms of the internet or processed foods to reactionaries who want to return to the 1200s.
Like “the poison is determined by the dose” and “fish don’t know they’re wet,” “digital cages” is another cliché appropriate to this discussion.
We see this in many areas of life, actually. Because there is a large anti-vax movement, anyone who mentions that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines carry a tiny risk of (sometimes fatal) myocarditis in certain populations must be anti-vaxxers, despite the fact that the European Union restricts the use of the Moderna vaccine by age for this reason. Or anyone who criticizes masks in schools is some kind of COVID-denier, despite the fact that the UK and the EU both ban masking for elementary school students.
I don’t mean the terrible, the illegal, the immoral, the just-plain bad, or really anything other than odd. Bad stuff on the internet is actually rather straightforward, and can be avoided relatively easily. We can thank the saints who work for Google and Facebook sifting through all the evil stuff so that we never have to see it. The stuff I am talking about is more easily categorized as “strange.”
In case you were wondering, Kingsnorth capitalizes “The Machine” when he refers to global capitalism. He lives at the intersection of the extremes of both the “Buy Local” left and the anti-globalist right.
For a deeper dive on this, here is a sidebar I wrote on the topic of battling monsters.