Does Anyone Else Feel Like We Should Stop Using The Internet?

So I was walking through the park yesterday and this squirrel ran right across my feet and it made me think about how much time we spend behind screens instead of connecting with nature and what that does to our brains long-term and honestly it reminds me of when I used to go camping every summer as a kid in upstate New York where my uncle Joe would build us the most elaborate fire pits out of stones he found down by the creek and one night a bear came within thirty feet of our tent which was terrifying but also kind of magical because you could feel how alive everything is when there are no notifications interrupting your experience and I wonder if that's what we're losing — not just trees but that raw awareness of existence that comes from being fully present in an environment without any digital mediation between yourself and the world around you.

I feel this on so many levels, like every time I open Twitter my cortisol spikes for no reason and then someone posts a deep-fried meme of Shrek crying in the corner and suddenly it's fine again but also never actually fine because the loop just keeps going — which reminds me of this summer when I went to that cabin upstate with my brother Mike and we had zero service for like eight days straight and at first I was literally vibrating from withdrawal and looking at a blank screen every five minutes but then something weird happened where after about forty-eight hours everything started being clearer, the conversations got longer because nobody could check their phone mid-sentence, and one night we sat on the porch until three in the morning just talking about nothing and everything and I swear my brain felt different the next day — like it was remapping itself back to a slower operating system. That's what I think this thread is trying to get at, not that we should throw our phones into a river but that there's something fundamentally broken in how constant access reshapes our attention span and makes everything feel urgent even when nothing is actually happening right now which is the trap because you end up doomscrolling through other people's highlight reels while your own life feels like it's on pause.