stop telling me to touch grass

an essay on digital community, projection and the WiFi demons haunting my comments

The internet loves telling me to touch grass. They say it like it’s a prescription. Like I’ve never opened a window in my life. The funniest part is that most people delivering this advice are probably commenting from beds they haven’t left in over 12 hours, surrounded by empty takeout bags and a ring light. It’s the pot telling the kettle to log off.

I understand the spirit behind it. It’s a longing disguised as an insult. What people actually mean is: I’m overwhelmed, everything feels fake and I miss feeling grounded in something real. It’s not judgement, it’s projection. (1) But instead of admitting that, they launch “touch grass” at strangers like it’s a spell that will suddenly fix the world’s collective burnout. It’s community, but weaponized. It’s yearning, but poorly translated.

**quick footnote for the unbothered: after my last two posts, a small but enthusiastic club of internet detectives decided that my writing was “AI slop” because I used this pattern a few times, so now I’m adding a counter to help them build their case without hyperventilating. you’re welcome ;)**

We’re living through a curious moment, everyone is hyperconnected yet starving for the kind of spaces where you exist without performance. Third places used to be automatic. The shopping mall where you wandered with no money and too much lip gloss. The condo courtyard that doubled as a playground and a debate stage. The public park where kids practiced TikTok dances long before TikTok existed.

But now everything is a transaction, a brand, a reservation, a line. You can’t even sit at a café longer than ninety minutes without ordering another drink and accidentally contributing to inflation. So we flee online, hunting for the ease we once had offline. Then people shame us for being… where else were we supposed to go? It’s not addiction, it’s migration. (2)

This is where the irony becomes almost poetic. I get told to go outside by people who don’t understand that the internet is my outside. Not the whole thing, I’m not out here finding community in comment wars, but the little corners. My Substack, my silly TikToks, the people who read, respond, debate, laugh. There’s a version of me here that is not performing for a grade, a paycheck, a social obligation. It’s still curated, of course. Everything is curated. But it feels like home, or at least like a bridge on the way to one.

Touching grass is lovely. I enjoy the outdoors, it’s not a moral achievement. But the idea that digital spaces are inherently inferior is outdated. It’s digital nostalgia wearing analog cosplay. The world has expanded. So have the ways we gather. Community didn’t die, it migrated. It’s not worse, it’s different. (3)

Maybe the issue isn’t that people are too online. Maybe it’s that third spaces became luxury goods, and the internet stepped in as the world’s unofficial living room. Not perfect, not always peaceful, but accessible in a way the physical world increasingly isn’t. And when your physical city is expensive, alienating, or dangerous, a well-tuned timeline can feel like a park bench that never kicks you out.

Growing up in a generation that is so online didn’t make me detached from reality, it just meant reality had multiple tabs open. We moved between physical and digital spaces the way older generations moved between rooms in a house. To us, the internet was never an escape. It was an extension. A second living room. A hallway we shared. A place where things happened even when nothing was happening.

And because of that, digital community never felt fake. It felt accessible. Offline, belonging usually depends on timing, confidence, and whether you look like someone people want to talk to. Online, belonging happens sideways, through punctuation, timing, chaotic emojis, a long text at 1am, a comment that says “I felt this.” People show their insides first. It’s backwards, but in a way that makes sense for us.

People love pretending that being “too online” ruined us, but the truth is for some of us it did the opposite, the internet gave us rooms the physical world wouldn’t. You can walk into a comment section the way people in the 90s wandered into each other’s living rooms. No appointment, no dress code, no need to present your most palatable self.

It’s not perfect, communal spaces never are, but it’s honest. Online, belonging is often accidental. And accidental belonging is sometimes the most real kind.

That’s why “touch grass” in the non-meme way feels so outdated to me. I do touch grass. I love the outdoors. I’m not a vampire. But online is where I’ve touched understanding, humor, debate, softness, chaos, curiosity, recognition, all the textures that make a life feel lived. That counts, even if a few people in my comments are having a personal crisis over it.

Growing online didn’t shrink my world. It widened the map.

So no, random @user42917, I will not be touching grass on your command. I touch it when I want to and not as a punishment for being visible online. What I am doing is building something, tiny digital rooms where people can linger and breathe. Rooms where community doesn’t need proof of purchase.

My last post proved it in real time. The comments turned into a village square where every archetype showed up at once: the philosophers, the doomsday prophets, the soft-launch scholars, the secret romantics, the AI detectives, the bitter uncles, the grass evangelists.

People kept writing “touch grass” like they were prescribing antibiotics. Others insisted I had been replaced by a robot because apparently using parallel sentences is now a sign of being silicon-coded. It’s not style, it’s evidence, right? (4) Meanwhile someone else was quoting Basil Hallward like the whole thing had been assigned reading.

It was chaos in the purest, most internet way. And honestly, it cracked me up. Because all of them, the praise, the hate, the well-meaning lectures, the random victorian literature references, were gathering in the same place for the same reason. They wanted to be part of a conversation. Even when they were yelling, they were participating. Even when they were calling it slop, they were coming back to check if I replied.

If anything, that comment section proved my point about third spaces, the internet is one of the last places where strangers gather without needing to buy anything or be invited. Is it messy? Absolutely. But so were cafés in the 1800s. So were town plazas. So is any place where humans wander in with feelings they haven’t sorted out.

People don’t say “touch grass” because they think I’ve never been outside. They say it because they’re overwhelmed by a world that swapped community for performance and doesn’t know where to put the discomfort. They tell me to get offline because they’re online enough to see me. It’s not concern, it’s displacement. (5) The irony is delicious. The logic is none. The humanity is obvious.

And if someone thinks a robot writes my posts, that’s between them and whatever WiFi demon haunts their house. I know the truth, I wrote my little essay with my little brain, in my little bed, half-horizontal. There’s nothing artificial about that. It’s not AI, it’s girlhood. (6)

In a way, all those comments were proof that people are still looking for a place to exist, to yell, to overthink, to confess, to argue about relationships like it’s a group project. If that’s not a third space, then what is?

Digital soil counts too. And sometimes it grows better things than grass. It’s not nature, it’s nurture. (7) **Counter updated. Mystery solved. Case closed. Detectives, you may breathe now.**

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