By Lia Lee

When I was small, I was scared of trees. As a sensitive child, I was full of fear.

I was scared of the sun. How the breeze felt on my skin. How bark was rough, and how the ground could be eerily chilly. I didn’t like bugs. I especially didn’t like bugs.

Now two decades later, I wonder what changed.

When I was two I was stung by a bee; it cemented my fear that all these furry little buzzers with stingers were out to get me. When I was 21, I stared at a bee colony inside a glass showcase in a museum. They were just there, existing.

I remember the first time I saw a spider on my car seat, I screamed. My arms flailed while my father laughed his head off beside me and tried to brush off the spider.

“You’re so much bigger than it. Who do you think is more scared?” 

I didn’t know. I just knew that I didn’t understand it; that freaked me out.

Then I read a poem—Ten Legs, Eight Broken. It removed something inside of me.

I thought maybe it had something to do with the way my mother scrubbed all the floors clean with lemon-smelling bleach. How she screened the doors closed and our house smelled lovingly of artificially produced perfume from a luxury bottle, plucked from the fields of Japan or France. I had always wondered what she was so afraid of; I am starting to think it may have been the same thing.

An entire generation of us grew up like this: indoors and sealed off. Gen Z spends whole afternoons in darkened bedrooms, phone screens lighting up dim faces while they compare themselves to strangers on TikTok and the sun sets outside unnoticed. Most of us know that it is good for us to eat on time, talk to our loved ones, or take a damn walk outside. Instead, the world passes us at our fingertips.

We are increasingly removed from nature. We no longer know who makes our textiles or what our daily items are made from. We use but do not understand; we consume but do not digest. We just try to exist in a world that convinces us technology will bring happiness. In some instances it has. But if entertainment were sugar, we would all have diabetes. Convenience has pushed us further from where we began.

We’ve somehow built an entire culture around staying inside a virtual world and it seems it’s only going to get worse. Every day the world is heading toward an AI-driven future, and a little further away from the origins of humans. We are increasingly enamored by what exists on screens. Warmth can be manufactured through a gentle bot voice, love can be paid for in bottomless online simulations. Obedience and convenience, delivered at the cost of patience and a willingness to communicate. We allow strangers on the internet to see the nooks and crannies of our deepest desires, while hiding away from the rest of the natural world.

One thing I’ve noticed is our collective fear of bugs. Tiny critters that have lived beneath our feet for thousands of years. When they appear in our sterile homes we freeze. We scream. While we domesticate beasts and predators into lap pets, the real nature of animals is forgotten.

Touch grass has become a shitpost, something to remind people that reality is worth interacting with. It’s sad that the reminder is necessary.

A four-year study of over 3,800 adolescents published in JAMA Pediatrics found that each additional hour of social media use correlated with a measurable rise in depressive symptoms, year over year. Upward social comparison, measuring ourselves against others with seemingly perfect bodies and lives, erodes self-esteem and feeds depression. Adolescents exposed to idealized images on social media and television consistently reported lower self-esteem, which is strongly correlated with worsening depressive symptoms (Boers et al., 2019).

The physical cost of staying inside compounds this. A synthesis of systematic reviews in the ACSM Training & Conditioning Journal found that screen time in children is linked to lower self-esteem, social behavior problems, reduced physical fitness, and poorer academic achievement. In adults, the consequences grow grimmer still: associations with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and all-cause mortality. Sedentary screen-bound living is making us sicker, sadder, and more removed from what was once familiar to us.

All this is to say, maybe it is not good to stray too far from our roots. Sometimes it does not lend well to forget what we came from, why we strove for better lives, and what we were searching for all along.