Touching grass isn't enough

What to do—and what not to do—now.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

It’s been seven days since my last doomscroll 🙏 —Kate

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Starting last weekend, I knew it would be unwise to heavily scroll social media. Every poll, every update, every sly remark felt like a needless hit of adrenaline that got me no closer to any kind of reprieve from uncertainty. I might as well wait for The Big One to drop and find out the winner of the presidential election all at once, rather than subject myself to death by a thousand tweets. 

So that’s what I did. On the day of the election, I voted. I went to the movies after work. I got home, took an edible, and was asleep by 8:30pm. All night, I was tossing and turning, waking up at regular intervals but refusing to check my phone. Finally, by 6am, I was ready for the news. I turned over and saw the last text in my group chat: “Fuck this.”

I will not opine on what this result means, the things it will change, who is to blame. I made the mistake of looking at Twitter after the dam broke, and got plenty of that from other people. In fact it was this tweet, by

P.E. Moskowitz

, that finally got me to log off:

“now more than ever may i recommend getting offline and not ruining your brain on here. yelling in circles on a platform owned by a nazi will help no one. literally any and everything would be more helpful than that.”

For the past 10 years, I remained plugged in to platforms that actively harmed my mental health for the sake of staying present in some kind of perceived community. It felt like doing otherwise was to put my head in the sand and disregard a town square where I could—should—hear about the problems and issues facing society. If more people than ever are online, then more people than ever should feel in community with one another. But while no one factor can explain Tuesday’s result, I think it’s safe to say that isolation and loneliness played a potentially decisive role—young men who feel misunderstood and a working class that feels abandoned and a voting bloc that feels ignored and a society who is told the only ones to blame for this are each other.

You can’t innovate away loneliness

I’ve been writing for years about social media fueling the loneliness crisis and the way capitalism and big tech have innovated away human connection and trapped us in ecosystems that encourage and profit from a meaner, angrier user base. These platforms too often funnel young men into toxic spaces that answer their loneliness by pointing the finger at women, and make the divide between parties so stark and two dimensional that we balk at the idea of common ground. 

Now that we’re on the other side of these consequences, I can no longer kid myself. It’s time to stop ceding our humanity to these platforms. It’s time to invest back into IRL community. It’s time to stop 24/7 scrolling social media—you will not find the answers there. 

The day after the day after, when I was finally ready to process what happened, I turned to the voices online that I trusted. I watched Jamelle Bouie’s reflection on TikTok, AOC’s live on Instagram. On, yes, social media. I’m not advocating for a total rejection of the internet—that’s unrealistic and counterproductive. I’m advocating for a reframing of the role it plays in our lives. Social media should be, and used to be, a tool to make real life easier, not replace it. We’re spending all this time indulging voyeurism and inventing people to be mad at and then looking up at the real world and asking who let it all go to shit. 

Bouie and AOC ended their videos with the same message: If we want to make a change, we have to leave our house. We have to be uncomfortable. We have to risk people not reacting the way we predicted they would. We have to disagree. We have to hear the other side. We have to change our minds. We have to build community with people we didn’t necessarily choose. We have to do all the things that, I’d argue, the steady creep of phone-first thinking promised to shield us from. What we gained avoiding awkward small talk with people on the street we are about to lose in everything else. How can we claim to be informed when we never interact with our neighbor?

This is not all all down to us. It’s the politicians who were just elected who are making the choices to dismantle our rights, it’s the politicians who failed to speak to the real issues of voters who should take blame for the defections of their voters. The negative consequences of a digital-first environment are not our fault, either. We were the subjects of a real-time experiment that was successful. Scrolling was purposefully made addicting, these environments knowingly all-consuming, by the billionaires who coincidentally serve to benefit from this election’s outcome. 

What’s happening outside your window is real; a feed of the people and subjects algorithmically determined to validate or anger you is not. I look out mine and see my neighbor on his roof. I see him there often, like he is today, watering his plants. We can do more than touch grass—we can get outside and help something, anything, grow.