June 24, 2024

The case for touching grass

Online is marvellous, but there are good reasons to cultivate an offline life too

I keep seeing advice for reducing screen time that takes as one of its base assumptions that offline is better than online and that reducing screen time is good in itself. Sometimes this is straightforward knee jerk fear of unfamiliar technology, and sometimes it's a deeper discomfort with the many problems of modern life displaced onto smartphones as a convenient scapegoat, but I always find it misses the point.

Smartphones and the internet are tools. Used properly, they can make life easier in so many ways, but like any tool they can also be misused. Rather than a blanket condemnation and exhortation to find an offline replacement for any online pleasure, I wanted to look at some actual reasons why maybe we should move some - not all - of our lives offline.

We need a local friend group

I hate the suggestion that internet friends "aren't real friends". The bonds of friendship don't depend on where you met or how you keep in touch, and apart from blood relatives, everyone I love or trust came into my life thanks to one app or another. The internet has made it possible to discover kindred spirits on the other side of the world, and that can only be a positive.

But there are some things a friend on the other side of the world just can't help with. Helping you move house. Giving you a lift to your hospital appointment. Letting you crash on their floor when you have a gas leak. And although words of comfort can mean a lot, sometimes you just need a physical hug.

So although our online friendships are well worth nurturing, it's also a good idea to develop friendships with people around us. You might not find your perfect kindred spirit if you don't have the whole world to choose from, but you should find people you can get along with reasonably well. Especially because...

People are more normal offline

Take transphobia, for instance. There's no shortage of offline transphobes, but they mostly stick to regurgitating "concerns" from the pages of the gutter press or making loud remarks about various organs. They're not writing breathless fanfics every time they see someone they think might be trans, denouncing us as a Soros-funded plot to bring down Western civilisation, or any of the other nonsensical things transphobes on twitter do daily.

The social media algorithms prioritise "engagement", which is to say attention. And they aren't capable of distinguishing between good and bad attention, so the infuriating nonsense that everyone is itching to rebut is what gets put in front of our eyeballs the most. We all react to it, because it's there and it's infuriating, and the algorithm takes that as proof we're interested. And so the discourse rolls on, growing ever more inflammatory. Sometimes it's almost a relief to go outside and encounter someone whose attitude is just "but they have male skeletons."

We need a little friction sometimes

One of the great benefits of the internet is convenience. Sending an email or an IM is easier than posting a letter or making a phone call. Buying from an online store is easier than walking into a shop and having to carry your purchases home. Kitten videos never need their litter trays cleaning.

But what's convenient for us is also convenient for those who wish us ill. Spam emails have been a problem since the internet became mainstream because there is virtually no cost to the sender, allowing them to flood our inboxes with their rubbish. A friend mentioned cyberbullying and I was skeptical that it was any worse than the offline kind. He conceded that it isn't, but the low cost to the perpetrator means they can target more victims and over a longer period.

And it's not just malicious communications. By making everything too convenient, we deprive ourselves of opportunities to stop and think. It's all too easy to send a message in the heat of the moment that we'll deeply regret later, or to buy something we don't need and can't afford because it looked cool on screen. And those enticing videos of someone else's perfect life can distract us from the immediate needs of our own.

We can't live on information alone

Much as we might sometimes want to avoid it, we are very much corporeal beings, and we need to take care of our bodies. We need exercise, sunshine, fresh air, and direct contact with some kind of living creatures. If we learned nothing else from those disconcerting weeks in the spring of 20201 we learned how quickly we can become destabilised if we don't have these things.

Cues like fatigue are a reasonably effective way for our bodies to tell us what they need, but when we spend too long online, we blunt our awareness of those cues. Admittedly it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem because those of us who are already prone to depressive inertia will tend to seek out the convenience of online entertainments, but it's much harder to ignore your body telling you you're tired and should rest if you're out for a walk than if you're allowing yet another episode of your Netflix show to start.

You can stay under the radar

The internet, especially social media, is becoming more and more the property of a handful of very rich men who want to extract as much money as possible from it, with the ordinary users just being a resource. No longer content with selling our eyeballs to advertisers, they're now collecting every kind of data on our habits to build up an often alarmingly accurate picture of us, and then selling that to advertisers. It's possibly to shield yourself to a degree by using a VPN (Virtual Private Network), but for those of us who aren't particularly technically minded, that introduces the friction we trusted the internet to reduce.

How much simpler to just log off, stash your phone in a drawer, and spend an afternoon doing something that Zuckerberg and Musk have no way of finding out about! It may only disrupt their data gathering machine in small ways, but it's still satisfying to know there's something they can't monetise.

Conclusion

As I said, this is not a recommendation to log off altogether. Quite apart from everything else, I'd be an immense hypocrite advising that in an post I've written and published online. We need to strike a balance, nurturing both our long distance and local friendships, enjoying the convenience of online activities while still respecting our physical needs. And that balance will look different for different people. Someone young and abled in a bustling metropolis will have far more offline options than an older disabled person out in the sticks.

So don't try to impose your balance on others, and don't listen to anyone who's pushing the knee-jerk "screens bad" message. But if you recognise in yourself a tendency to be Extremely Online, maybe give a few offline activities a try. Some of them are actually quite fun.