Go touch grass
As a physicist and a gamer, it's so easy to spend almost all my time staring at glowing rectangles.
I get up and immediately look at my pocket-sized glowing rectangle. I listen to audio from my glowing rectangle on the way to work. At work, I stare at a bigger glowing rectangle as I program ways to use that bigger glowing rectangle for physics. I then come home and relax by playing games on my gaming glowing rectangle. I spend a horrific amount of time staring at these artificial things during most of the year. And I would venture to say that I have just approximately described many--if not most--people who will read these words.
But this is not the way humans are supposed to live. We lived pretty much the same for hundreds of thousands of years, and this recent development in how we spend our time is a stark divergence from the norm. Nearly every second of a modern human's life is carefully crafted so we don't have to feel our feelings. No wonder why we are so anxious and feel so depressed.
I find that, not too long after the sun comes out in the spring, I'll eventually decide to go on a hike or a walk in nature by myself. If I'm smart, I'll leave my phone and headphones in my backpack or off my person. I'm forced to sit with my thoughts and actually feel things instead of distracting myself from the current moment. I'm forced to feel the wind, hear the birds and the water... And wow, what a feeling! It's like I feel human again after living as a shell of a person for about 6 months. And it's no wonder why I feel this way; this very experience is what humans have had for thousands of years before.
It's so easy to not do this. It's easier to just pound on the dopamine system as much as possible to make ourselves feel better about what's happening in the current moment. It's far more difficult to feel things and deal with them. The phrase "go touch grass" describes this well. I have to consciously choose to spend regular time this way: no phone, no audio, and no input from other humans. I have to actively choose to be outside, to meditate, and to walk through nature.
This is one of my secrets to life, and this is what I do when I want to feel peace.
It's important to point out that I am no Luddite. I love video games, I like my time with my current physics work (computational physics, soon to be back to ultrafast optics), and I love watching funny memes and interesting YouTube videos. The problem is when those things take over every second of my time so that there's nothing left to live as a human would 200 years ago. 200 years is so short compared to the time the species has existed.
Do you feel this way? Do you have a different take? Email me if you have some ideas.
-Mitt amittengames@gmail.com