Touching Grass

Happy earth month 🌎

With AI advancing at a relentless pace and technology creeping into every corner of our lives, the world is starting to feel unreal. Our generation has spent decades automating and digitizing everything — entertainment, shopping, jobs, art, even companionship — to the point where you can sustain an entire life just staring at screens. Dystopian? Most definitely. And yet, I refuse to spiral into dystopian dread. Amidst all the noise, I choose to stay optimistic about the human parts of life that no machine could ever replace.

Spending time with a baby is the perfect antidote. A baby is the most natural, raw, and pure thing in existence, the living embodiment of what it means to be human. My daughter exists entirely in the present. She can only be entertained in the moment, reacting in real time as I make silly faces and babble sounds at her until she breaks into a smile. She loves everything humans are biologically wired to love: faces, voices, music, movement, the outdoors, physical touch, our mere presence. She is endlessly curious, always wriggling out of my arms to grab whatever catches her eye. She is untainted by the world, and she never fakes an emotion. There is nothing money, the internet, or AI can offer her, which says everything about how little those things actually matter.

I see the sparkle in her eyes when she discovers something new, like a ballpoint pen. Something so mundane to us is absolutely fascinating to her. When she finally wiggles her way within reach, she picks up the pen with her whole fist, and waves it around like a baton for a few glorious seconds. She then breaks out into a full-body wiggle, excitedly flails all her limbs at once, and grins up at me like she's just found treasure. Joy really is that simple. How did we forget?

It's easy to lose sight of how good the simple stuff can be. Presence, sensation, connection — these aren't luxuries, they're the foundation of living. Food, nature, real conversation, moving your body, making mistakes… the most ordinary things in the world are also the most essential, and they always have been. No technological advancement will ever replace them. In a world designed to make us forget that, we have to choose to remember.

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