Grady Amick

We can’t turn to different parts of the internet to find out how to resist other parts. We need to connect in the physical world.

Two hours in the woods, my first notebooks show, and I’d begun to understand it as a kind of bloodletting. It has been years since I picked up a stick and took it home, even the gnarliest, most warlock-bidding ones aren’t worth the thought of taking any of nature’s treasures taller than the intractable mud on the bottoms of my shoes. Part of the reason why I go out there, or so I tell myself, is to check, as a museum guard might, that it’s all still in place, only I see more change than they do, and welcome it to the same extent.

Here is a photo of me taken at a pipe opening in April 2024:

Sam Payne-Young

I sit somewhere in Cherokee Park, evidently happy about it.

And here is that very place when I came back to it, in August 2025:

Grady Amick

We can't turn to different parts of the internet to find out how to resist other parts. We need to connect in the physical world.

Close as I got, I couldn’t sit down the same way. The tree that I later used to cross the river, though, is still there, bare in a way that insinuates some other travelers having had the same idea as me, though the bareness goes away as you get further across, suggesting that not everyone was as successful. The scope of these faultline-speed shifts usually sets in at around the one-hour mark of a good walk, and it was precisely then that a car powered its engine and made me nearly jump out of myself. Things change out here, just not in the way I was ever used to them changing.

I eliminated social media more or less entirely from my life in January 2024, only leaving YouTube and my 5-minute weekly sprints through Instagram to see what my favorite bands are up to. I went on some walks before this, but most of them were what I called Kantwalks, so called because the German philosopher Immanuel Kant would walk from his house to the lamppost at the end of his street eight times a day, so ritually that the housewives would set their clocks to him, which I can say from experience is a short walk.

That I learned those kinds of things from the internet stopped me from calling my habit an addiction and made it that much harder to kick. I kicked it after a million things coalesced perfectly — my love for the Luddite writer David Foster Wallace, my clear anxiety, a particularly nice winter — in an honestly inimitable way. Whenever I tell the story, that I made the call on a random afternoon, that I read three books in three days afterward, it sounds more immediate than it was. I wanted, as many do, to get my brain back for a long time before I did.

In the post-Kantwalk, pre-quit days, the five-or-so month sliver of occasional strolls and frequent dread, my routine was sophomoric. School. Home. Watch (TV). Watch (bed, phone). Watch (desk chair, laptop). Work (with interspersed watching). Music. Bed. It was the most zombified I’d ever been and the most manic I ever want to be. For those months, amassing potential energy like a fire-retardant grenade miles above the atmosphere, not a single shakeless breath got around to coming, not a single piece of good or bad news got through the radio signal in my brain that had been tuned to the whitest noise out there. 

Or so I felt after I got rid of social media; a little self-righteous, a little contorted, but necessary to parry against a world which harshly and excitedly calls for you to be Connected. 

Here is the scale of my brain’s sensitivity: That he can rip out someone’s tongue and keep his heart rate under 80 BPM seriously makes me envy Hannibal Lecter. The miniscule thrill of going to a library yesterday, a full year and three quarters since I cut the greatest stressor in my life, took a 20-minute walk home to deflate from. But I needed “Blood Meridian” like a shark needs to keep swimming: I’ve never met anyone who feels a peace quite like mine after the first hour of marathon reading. 

This isn’t a grand philosophical pleasure. It feeds the same part of me that got pieces of candy after doing chores. Tech delivers dopamine, but I’m surprised that the minds of Silicon Valley haven’t seen over decades that people aren’t machines that take X dopamine and turn it into Y fulfillment, that meaningful joys are incremental. This may also be because culture and values can’t easily be charted in relation to the amount of money people spend on one product. 

I hate to be a nerd (at least for this essay), but the despair that technology brings is a consequence of basic economic principles that there’s no way to breach this debate without understanding. 

Let’s assume that, since fulfillment makes lives better, it is a public good. We can even capitalize that. Public Good. There. A corporation’s job is not to create PGs, but to profit. The two are not impossible to do at once, but profit goes first. In this particular PG (fulfillment), people are happier, healthier and — tidal wave incoming — more economically productive. It’d seem that this clinches it and that tech owners are idiots not to make products which give people more money. 

Wrong. 1. More money for everyone else means less money for tech people, at least in the short term. And we can guess that an industry which goes through water like ants go through dirt only cares about the short term. 2. Yes, they may earn some more if the PG is done, but so will their competitors. They end up putting all the resources into a market that serves their destruction. It’s unsafe at best and suicidal at worst. Better to keep people addicted to one’s own product and eat the small sum you could make from improving their lives.

It sounds cynical, and maybe it is, but it’s all pretty transparent. Instagram makes teens depressed and then, to drown that depression, teens use Instagram. Meta wouldn’t dare make Instagram algorithms less effective — their users may be tempted to go outside. To feed their audiences healthy content that tells them the things they can do to better the world would make them both quit the product to go to work and possibly do work that chases the zillionaire owners of the product. Meta would be stupid to let this happen. 

Besides, and maybe this is an offshoot of my tactile ADHD color, but I cannot be the only one who sees unignorable irony in the companies promising wireless connection. Wireless connection! At this rate, I will have no surprise when “Keep it Cold” stovetops and “Embrace Overgrowth” lawnmowers enter the market. Trust us, they say, to maintain your arteries and neurotransmitters and other unpleasant meat person stuff while you slosh around in our vat of warm Attention Liquid which will prod your every pore and dilate your eyes to so many horrors that your optic nerve atrophies as a survival instinct, and do it all with no touchable, understandable link between your vat and anyone else’s. The only clear link between one physical thing and another I can see in the tech industry is that between our collective billions of dollars and their spaceships. But anyway.

I am still split on whether we can reach PGs with our culture attending to corporations that don’t care about them, but I know we can’t do it right now. I have not heard of such a conquering addiction. Technology is QR codes at restaurants and electronic grading systems and TikTok-formatted ads and online betting and WiFi-enabled dehumidifiers and Spotify ads interrupting coffee shops. We have dealt with ubiquitous grips before, but with technology, we are not so much chainsmoking as we are walking outside into a nicotine-powered smog that we can literally never avoid. (Try it: go for a 30-minute walk without your phone and you’ll come home to at least one person thinking you’re dead.) 

I believe that, of the things I just listed, two or three of them make things better more than they make them worse. I do not believe that we can slowly and gently deconstruct our relationship with something so deadeningly addictive. The internet remains a part of my life, but an hour on social media too quickly turns into three for me to give it any of my time. Religiosity has stopped declining because people are so starved for meaning, and if you’re one of those people, consult the cross if it helps you, but I also recommend blotting out social media as I have. 

“Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire.” The poet and critic Wendell Berry wrote those words in 1987. I can’t ask the 90-year-old personally, but I can’t imagine he’s happy with our dependence accelerating as it has. Berry lives in Port Royal, KY, but has been down the road a few times, even moving to the city in the 1960s after several fellowships landed him a job teaching English at New York University. He went home quickly.

Most of his work rails against big cities and technology companies for disemboweling rural America in about forty different ways, and he deserves an exhaustive treatise, which I would love to get around to writing, but the best informant of the question I’m answering is the essay I quoted last paragraph: “Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer [capitalizations sic].” He is more devoted to hating large companies than I am, which is a hard title to earn, but he sure earns it. He writes by hand, like I do, but I greedily use a desklamp, which seems to sort me with the condemned. In Berry’s words, “How could I write conscientiously against the rape of nature if I were, in the act of writing, implicated in the rape? For the same reason, it matters to me that my writing is done in the daytime, without electric light.”

Politics and name-calling aside, Berry is a genius of the obvious question. He is one of the few writers who asks whether more efficiency, more energy, more gray modernity are really good things. Here is the obvious question I pose to anybody who has been clutching their rosaries lo these last seven pages and demands that I approach social media warmly; it connects us, it creates community, it binds the galaxy together (I included the last one because those people think of themselves as Kenobian saviors and I should humor them after all the time they’ve spent reading): in the same way Berry argues that computers aren’t necessary for writing, can we finally see that the internet isn’t necessary for connecting, and even that it’s objectively ruined it? Hold on one second.

This part demanded a scenery change. I’m on my front steps with the stair above me serving as a desk. There is no sample for what unplugged life is like, at least none I can walk to, so I will have to cut corners. There’s a gaggle of kids, maybe 9 or 10, playing soccer a few houses over, just as I used to. I always royally sucked at soccer, and by the time I was their age I played more intricate Ghost-in-the-Graveyard games. The herd of kids my age had thinned by then, not because they were butthurt about the death of soccer, but because they were inside. We are the first generation to have a cutoff — 13 for me, much younger for others — where we get a device that obliterates our drive to leave the house. 

No, rock music in the ‘60s and cable TV in the ‘80s are not the same. Those things were usually shared, and the people that shared them were usually from the same neighborhood. They couldn’t curate and filter their interactions; they had to get along. Maybe our devices reduce friction, but I’m not sure they help, because friction has the power of noise, the constant ring to be resolved. So they learned how to resolve it. Nobody should be unsafe: I do not argue for total childhood anarchy, for the girl biking down the road from me to lose her helmet and raise Cain. I do wonder what would happen if our world became more physical, because after all, tech doesn’t destroy friction, it just puts it into tiny compartments that wage war on your brain and leave you inert. 

It may have been silly to choose the picture of decayed infrastructure as the feature for this piece. Nature ruins our work is pretty far from what I’m trying to get at. I can see that change, though, and touch it. It moves slowly, at a pace asking for care but not requiring terror. Things still change out here, and kids still fall, but they can look at the road ahead of them, know the concrete from the grass. They can tell a pitching scooter from a rolling one.

It’s been said that the internet is a machine that devours trust; it also destroys sensation. It is all primal brain — no mind, no body, no soul. Cigarettes, junk food, alcohol, bad relationships: these are all fine metaphors for the social internet, and ones which people smarter than I have played out. I add one more, one that kids will hopefully get before they receive a phone: the claw machine. Grab for fulfillment, and miss. Grab for connection, and miss. Grab for information, and miss. Another dollar, another dollar, another dollar, and there’s no despair like walking away from one of those prizeless.

Alternately, you are the plush — prodded here, yanked there, never brought to anyone caring. Flip the players as is useful to you. Lord knows the companies have gotten good at it.