The Real World

How many of your Facebook friends are truly your friends, the kind of people who know your family and have your back, the type of compadres who would drop everything to help you if you asked? That narrows it down, doesn’t it? So why would you spend more time on social media than you spend actually interacting with people who would be there for you in the real world? It’s like glazing over the population and not actually getting to know others, receiving comfort from them and learning from them. In that sense, social media is not expanding your horizons, it’s limiting them.

Horrors! That can’t be true, can it? We must be old, suspicious of new-fangled gadgets and not able to face change, right? Uh, no. We’re millennials who see an alarming disconnect between individuals and the real world. All of us are so addicted to our social media we’ve tuned out interaction with living people.

The cure is surprisingly simple. Commune with nature. Take a walk in the woods. It’s a feast, really, for all five senses, unlike staring at a tablet, laptop screen or smartphone. Smell the pine needles, watch the wildlife, hear the birds chirping, taste the unique flavor of meals cooked over a campfire, touch the bark of a 2000-year-old sequoia tree (if you’re in Yosemite).

Author, essayist and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who died far too young at age 44 in 1894, knew it was even more than that. “It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts,” he noted, “as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanates from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”

It took Robert Louis Stevenson (whose works include “Treasure Island” and “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”) fewer than 44 years to gain his wisdom about the forest. How long will it take you?