“Never in my life had I felt so plush/ or so slippery/ or so resplendently empty./ Never in my life/ had I felt myself so near/ that porous line/ where my own body was done with/ and the roots and the stems and the flowers/ began.”

~Mary Oliver, “White Flowers”

Years ago, author Ellen Ullman, drawing upon her Keynote Address “Wouldn’t You Rather be At Home?”, warned in her essay “The Museum of Me” that modern societies are entering an age of hyper-personalized living.¹ Entertainment, exercise, news, music—they’re all chosen for and deployed by us at the hour we feel most comfortable. There’s no more waiting period, no listening to an intermediary make suggestions, no sitting through the mediocre songs on the car radio until the hosts pick a good one. Everything one favors is at hand.

What is most chilling is that Ullman published this essay in 1999, long before the zenith of the smartphone and the consequent avalanche of Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok “content”—an ironic term considering both that these platforms have made people less content and that such matter doesn’t take up physical space. Half of all U.S. children have a phone by their 11th birthday.² Meanwhile, according to psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the 21st century holds some of the highest rates of teenage depression and anxiety seen in decades.³

As Neil Postman said, the tools make the culture; the culture doesn’t just make the tools.⁴

Or, perhaps, the tools situate the culture, and right now, people—especially Americans—are immobile. This, despite the false expansiveness that the overwhelming diversity of entertainment available makes one feel. Emotionally, politically, and socially, the tailored-to-you engagement enforced by Big Tech’s algorithms exalts familiarity. Individuals are encouraged to stay home, to take it easy, to walk away if something “triggers” them. Inevitably, this curtails experiences with the weird, uninteresting, confusing, and uncanny. By nature, these encounters force adaptability. In the necessary adjusting process, they foster curiosity, empathy, and emotional regulation.

Yet, amidst the opportunities of DoorDash, Netflix, and ChatGPT, it’s easy to forget this. It’s easy to remain inward. If one already knows what to seek and why to seek it, why attend public spaces like galleries, where some pieces look like Ikea mark-downs and others like someone’s LSD trip? Why hang out at libraries, where the homeless may shelter? Why visit museums, what with the bottlenecks of people at doorways, the germs, the slow elderly, the odd smells, etc., etc.? Discomforts, displeasures, disgusts. Just stay at home.

Nevertheless, as much as Americans love TikTok videos and Spotify “Wraps”, we keep coming back to the outdoors year after year. In 2024, a record 331.9 million people visited America’s national parks.⁵ As much as our society enjoys its creature comforts, its members are willing to get up early to drive to the campsite or trailhead, sometimes staying out in the dirt, rain, or snow for weeks.

Biophilia is the theory that natural spaces so calm the Homo sapien at the neurological level because our bodies and brains still perceive such spaces as home. Thus, we are soothed by the soil, sun, bark, and fractal patterns of leaves, trees, and hills.⁶ As the visual field perceives these structures, they induce what’s called “soft fascination”, a mode of consciousness in which the individual attends to a variety of mildly entertaining things yet clings to no single one.⁷ Delight comes slow rather than rocketing, encouraging gentle curiosity. One perceives a kaleidoscope of stimuli, but stimuli but without the harsh pull of music, flashing lights, and other hallmarks of modern life.

Nevertheless, to argue that the value in nature sanctuaries lies in their return of the human to the animal kingdom is too reductive a conclusion. Experiences in nature enhance imagination,¹⁰ helping people work through their problems, write papers, design systems, and create art. Green space also improves working memory and attentional control.¹¹ Unsurprisingly, Mozart, Einstein, and many other innovators took long walks to deepen their thoughts. These quiet moments outside opened them up to new ideas and technologies rather than locking them down into old modes of thinking.

Artistic openness feeds into interpersonal understanding. In the soft awe and occasional boredom of the natural world, one is quiet enough to traverse beyond one’s assumptions and prejudices. The people of Finland, named the world’s happiest country in 2025 per the UN World Happiness report, stand by their claim that proximity to nature is what contributes to their sense of well-being and bondedness.¹² At peace, individuals look for the good and trustworthy in others and give them, as well as themselves, the benefit of the doubt.

Thus, time in natural spaces bolsters just those very things that make us human: imagination, attention, innovation, and compassion.

Still, it’s not just a decoupling from preference, renewed creative potential, and kindness that nature provides. It’s a break from their opposites as well: the overwhelming pressure to be the perfectly socially just human. Hyper-awareness of one’s impacts—on the earth, on other people, on oneself—comes on the massive tides of the Internet’s information overload. The “soft fascination” of naturalistic scenes is so soothing because it subdues the reminder to the youth that they must stand out, make something of themselves, speak their truth, fight for justice, carve their own path, and other such platitudes. Knowledge of greenwashing and the horrors of global trade induce a self-defeating moral perfectionism; meanwhile, social media gurus encourage peace. To be ethical, relaxed, happy, driven, and self-validating yet socially in-tune all at once is a lot of pressure. Is it any wonder, in this isolating hurricane of identity musts, that people seek nature’s solitude? Is it any wonder individuals want to be briefly merged with the natural world?

In the outdoors, people are no longer reminded that their preferences and individual decisions—buying only fair-trade coffee, never using single-use plastic, wasting no piece of food—define whether they are “good” or “bad”. Such actions are important. Ty Raterman argues unilateral action does matter, if nothing else because it is the catalyst to larger cooperative schemes and it evokes the self-confidence to make positive change.⁸ Yet, to only ever think about nature in the mode of repentance rather than pleasure gets it wrong. Nature reduces impulsive decision-making and discourages instant gratification,⁹ but it does so gently, without the cynicism and helplessness that marks modern news feeds. In that taking a walk amidst the trees or bees offers reprieve from the ethical complications tied to modern decision-making, people are less overwhelmed and more optimistic about doing good.

Outside, you can’t tell the maples to become jack pine. You can’t ask the blue jays to stop yakking, the mosquitoes to stop nipping, and the painted turtles to walk across the path just so. By letting go of the queue of preferences, wishes, and frustrations, the brain finds reason to attend to the goldenrod, the shifting silt of the riverbed, the strange colors of the river bluffs, and the unrelenting woodpeckers. Detached from the callings for self-care, the depersonalization in nature builds an understanding of such external relevances that only grows with time, forming new habits of seeing the world. That is, nature illuminates what really matters and what really doesn’t. What happens outside of culture wars and chat groups as people suffer on the streets comes into focus. Thus, such discernment does not nullify sensitivity, but rather clarifies it. One no longer jumps to reduce with one term the weird, smelly, boring, confusing, and “backwards”. Enduring the wait for a sharper picture, one acquires openness and selflessness. Eco-citizens and neighbors are born not through TikTok ads but through patience, curiosity, and humility. Again, beneath the trees or in the tallgrass, not being an individual allows one to be more human.

Is it too much, then, to assume time in nature also encourages ethical consumption, civic engagement, interpersonal care in the workplace, a sense of the earth as one’s own, and overall respect? Is it too much to hypothesize that it builds democracy?

If the answer is “no”, the next question is not whether American society craves nature but how and why to escape the persuasive claims our technologies buttress about what we want to attend to. Now more than ever, we must coax our fellow citizens, kindly, to get outside of the museum of themselves. We must teach our children not only to think about their impacts on the natural world but also to take pleasure in the presence of burr oaks. Mental health crises are more real than ever, and it would be a mistake to dismiss engorged rates of anxiety, depression, and OCD, to name a few, as the weakness of a coddled nation. Yet, there’s a better way to address them. It starts with taking a deep breath of fresh air and looking around.

Notes

1. Ullman, Ellen. “The Museum of Me.” Harper’s Magazine, May 2000. https://harpers.org/archive/2000/05/the-museum-of-me/.
2. Barzilay, Ran, Samuel D. Pimentel, Kate T. Tran, Elina Visoki, David Pagliaccio, and Randy P. Auerbach. “Smartphone Ownership, Age of Smartphone Acquisition, and Health Outcomes in Early Adolescence.” American Academy of Pediatrics, December 1, 2025. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/doi/10.1542/peds.2025-072941/205716/Smartphone-Ownership-Age-of-Smartphone-Acquisition?redirectedFrom=fulltext.
3. Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation. Penguin Press, 2024.
4. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Penguin Random House, 1985.
5. National Park Service. “Visitor Use Data – Annual Visitation Statistics Release .” National Park Service, 2025. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/socialscience/visitor-use-statistics-dashboard.htm.
6. Williams, Florence. The Nature Fix. W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.
7. Basu, Avik, Jason Duvall, and Rachel Kaplan. “Attention Restoration Theory: Exploring the Role of Soft Fascination and Mental Bandwidth.” Environment and Behavior 51, nos. 9–10 (November 2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916518774400.
8. Raterman, Ty. “Bearing the Weight of the World: On the Extent of an Individual’s Environmental Responsibility.” Environmental Values 21, no. 4 (2012): 417–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41714202.
9. Berry, Meredith S., Mary M. Sweeney, Justice Morath, Amy L. Odum, and Kerry E. Jordan. “The Nature of Impulsivity: Visual Exposure to Natural Environments Decreases Impulsive Decision-Making in a Delay Discounting Task.” PLoS ONE 9, no. 5 (May 2014): e97915. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0097915.
10. Yeh, Chin-Wen, Shih-Han Hung, and Chun-Yen Chang. “The Influence of Natural Environments on Creativity.” Frontiers in Psychiatry 13 (July 2022): 895213. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.895213.
11. Weir, Kirsten. “Nurtured by Nature.” American Psychological Association 51, no. 3 (April 2020). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/04/nurtured-nature.
12. The Finnish Happiness Institute. “About Us.” Accessed December 22, 2025. https://happinessinfinland.com/.