Living, and learning, in reality

Disengaging from the physical world has costs

Photo by lalesh aldarwish, courtesy of Pexels

Working with your hands is not valued, and those who aspire to create things for a living are rare. School courses, like shop and home economics, get cut when budgets are tight in favor of academic courses. Field trips and time designated during the school day to explore nature are reduced in favor of test prep. And school lunches arrive on trays in pre-wrapped plastic containers, showing little resemblance to their original state. There are fewer and fewer expectations to live in and understand reality, but this isn't just a problem of schooling. Much of modern human life is divorced from reality, or at least loosely tethered to it. 

The physical, material world is a mysterious place to many people. And more and more, we seem to prefer to avoid living in it. With depression and anxiety on the rise, and fragility (of humans and systems) becoming more and more obvious—if you are paying attention—one has to wonder what is the impact of avoiding reality. If we don't live in reality, or have a distorted perception of it, how can we fix problems? Would we even be able to recognize the source of a problem?

The Internet has distorted reality and is usually where blame gets placed when people or their opinions seem unhinged from it. True crime enthusiasts think the world is scarier than it is, and Instagram influencers espouse beauty standards that are not attainable. ChatGPT is the most recent iteration of how the Internet can be used to distort reality, through which AI can replace real podcast hosts and guests having feasible conversations and real recording artists. Increasingly, discerning what photos and videos are real versus fake is difficult, and ChatGPT just upped the game. 

But television and even print media have long blurred the line between real and fake. When teenage girls and young women first learned that images in magazines were being doctored using a computer program called Photoshop, they were shocked and angry. I can't recall which company took their efforts to perfect a woman's body too far, making it obvious that the legs we were looking at could not exist in reality, but I do remember it was the moment when we knew for certain that the female body we were expected to aspire to did not exist in the physical world. 

Now, any girl or woman, not just magazine publishers, can distort their body or face to match what they view as ideal beauty and present that image to the world as reality—who they really are in person. The images and videos people upload to apps like Instagram and TikTok offer a selective view into someone's life, allowing viewers to see only what the producer wants them to see, and filters add an additional layer of distortion: You are not only seeing a specific scene of how the user wants to be portrayed, you are also seeing the physical manifestation of how they want to be seen. Photoshop infuriated women, yet when similar technology became available to all, they capitalized on it.

Children are spending less and less time outdoors and have reality mediated to them through images and cartoons. For instance, when I taught 1st grade, I took my class on a field trip to the zoo. There were many animals the kids were eager to see, but they specifically requested to see Gloria, Melman, Marty, and Alex. I too had watched and loved the DreamWorks Animation, Madagascar, so I knew exactly which animals they were referencing. The kids became acquainted with wild animals found at zoos through an animated movie, as well as books and other shows. They did not know what they were like in reality, and seeing them at the zoo made them better acquainted but still only provided a representation of wild animals, not how they behave in their natural habitat away from the human gaze.

My dad is a modern grandparent—he prefers to go by g-pa, a shortened version of grandpa, and a play on his first name—and he pulls out his phone to interact with my daughter. He uses images on his phone to help VV learn about different animals, showing her pictures he found on a kid-friendly website. Recently, he pulled up a picture of an armadillo and told her as she stared at the screen: this is an armadillo. But the photo on his phone screen is not an armadillo; it's an image of an armadillo. VV can't understand what an armadillo is and how it lives it's life—in other words, she can't really know it—without experiencing the creature in reality. Like with the DreamWorks characters, she can't even really know an armadillo if she sees it in a zoo. To understand the armadillo, she'd have to encounter it in its natural habitat. That way, she could then comprehend what it looks like and sounds like, what it eats, how it moves, and so forth. And she'd probably have to observe it from afar over an extended period of time to understand its habits, how it survives and thrives.

Even our food is divorced from reality. When asked where a particular vegetable comes from, a child would likely answer: the grocery store, as my significant other recently experienced. He owns a coin, stamp, and collectibles shop and has a bucket full of coins from around the world specifically set aside for kids who visit his shop. In an effort to encourage them to collect, he has kids under the age of 12 pick out five coins that they can keep, only if they can tell him which country they come from. The kid's parent, grandparent, or whoever brought them into the shop can give clues to help them guess, but the kids have to identify the countries themselves. Recently, one child picked out a coin from Japan. To help her figure out the country, her grandpa gave her clues. They recently ate sushi, so that was the clue he gave: Where does sushi originate from? Her answer: Costco. They all had a good laugh, and she eventually guessed correctly, but few kids (and sadly, few adults) can tell you how their food is produced and how it made its way to their local grocer.

And most of us don't have a clue about how many, if not all, of the objects we use every day are made. Knowing how all items one uses are constructed may be an unreasonable expectation, but knowing how your most prized possessions work is something worth striving toward. What if you needed an essential household item fixed, like your kitchen faucet, and there are no plumbers in your community? Or your phone, filled with important contact information, craps out and there are no knowledgeable phone connoisseurs around to retrieve them? Having a working knowledge of the material objects one uses most frequently is a part of living in reality. Like with food, the objects we use don't just magically appear in stores. Someone has to make them, and that someone could disappear.  

There are countless other ways that modern humans have divorced themselves from reality, these are just the examples that immediately come to my mind. Certainly, books and educational shows can help us come to better understand the world around us, but they cannot fully replace what is gained from interacting in and with the physical world. Not knowing how material objects work may not seem to cause much strife in one's life, and scrolling through one distorted image after another online may appear to be innocent, but they both affect our mental attitude and approach to life. And children who are raised divorced from reality are at risk of growing into adults either not capable of living in it or apprehensive of it. Adults have an imperative to acquaint the young with reality as much as possible.