I Would Like One Genuine Experience, Please

"Go touch grass" is actually great advice.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity. Not in the influencer sense - someone crying on TikTok front of a ring lamp (don’t forget the hashtags #authenticity #sovulnerable #fyp). I mean actual authenticity, like the evidence of human hands on a thing.

I hate that it is starting to feel so rare.

A few nights ago, I fell down an internet rabbit hole watching videos of “artists” making handmade products in little workshops. Pottery. Woodworking. Leather journals. Paintings. The videos are beautifully shot: warm lighting, meaningful closeups, soulful folk music humming in the background while hands sand a tabletop or shape a ceramic mug. I wrote about it here, and at the time I was mostly upset that the comments on the videos seemed completely oblivious to the fact that they weren’t watching a real artisan craft real things but rather an AI facsimile promoting mass-produced nonsense.

But as I’ve thought about it more, I’m starting to find hope in those comments because they suggest that we are all really yearning for something authentic.

If most people saw a decorative leather pouch on TEMU, we’d probably pass it by without a second thought. But if that leather pouch came with a story, we’d pause for a moment. If it was crafted by someone who used real tools, who learned that trade from her family, and who really, genuinely took pride in what she was making, it becomes infinitely more interesting. We really like the idea that somewhere, someone still knows how to make a thing slowly. And maybe that says something important about us.

I don’t think people are searching for perfection. We are tired of polished surfaces and optimized experiences and algorithmically flattened little rectangles of content. We’re tired of chain restaurants sourcing everything from the same industrial somewhere-or-other, where a fajita from Applebee’s tastes like a fajita from Chili’s, which tastes like a fajita from every other laminated-menu restaurant glowing beside a highway exit. We are drowning in things that are frictionless, instantaneous, and ultimately meaningless.

Deep breath.

Once again, the outdoors seems to have all of the answers.

Somewhere in Tennessee.

A campfire is inefficient. It gets smoke in your eyes. Your clothes smell afterward. Half the time you struggle to get the stupid thing lit while everyone stands around pretending not to notice.

And yet people will drive hours to sit around one.

Trail running is objectively uncomfortable. So is camping. So is hiking uphill in humidity under a blanket of mosquitoes. There are easier ways to spend a Saturday morning than climbing a ridge while sweating through your shirt.

Yet we do it, weekend after weekend. And when we aren’t out there doing the thing, we’re thinking about the thing, reminiscing about the thing, and wishing we were doing the thing. We yearn for that texture of real life - the mud on our shoes, the unexpected rainfall, a dented enamel mug, the sounds of loons at night, the smell of campfire smoke in your hair.

None of that is optimized. None of it is delivered to you by way of an algorithm. The forests don’t care about branding and the mountains don’t become more beautiful if photographed vertically for social media. They are outside of all of that, demanding presence, attention, sometime discomfort.

I wonder if this is part of why so many people have turned toward the outdoors in recent years. Hiking, camping, gardening, birding, national parks, mushroom foraging, trail running. Maybe we are all trying, in our own small ways, to reattach ourselves to reality in a world that it is making it increasingly difficult to do so.

People online love telling each other to “touch grass,” usually as an insult, but I’m starting to think it’s actually a pretty profound suggestion: to just go outside. Sit around a fire that fought you every step of the way to light. Sweat your way up a trail. Listen to the loons. Smell the rain coming before it arrives. Hold something made by human hands. Touch grass. Remember that the world is still gloriously imperfect and textured and real.

I used to think of the outdoors as a great way to escape reality, but now it feels like the best way to return to it.