Technology, wilderness, and the slow death of presence

I have always been baffled by how many people need some substances like caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and pills just to drag themselves through an ordinary day.

As a child, it struck me as strange. As an adult I fit into the category.

Our bodies clearly yearn for something natural, yet modern life seems built around tricking those instincts rather than satisfying them. We hang framed photographs of forests in office buildings instead of installing windows that open. We pump synthetic fragrances through ventilation systems instead of letting in fresh air. We spend our days beneath fluorescent lights while staring into blue-lit screens, disconnected from sunlight except for the brief moments we walk from a parking lot to a doorway.

Research increasingly suggests that this separation from natural environments has real psychological and physiological consequences. Studies published by organizations like the World Health Organization and researchers in environmental psychology have linked chronic screen exposure, social isolation, artificial light cycles, and lack of green space to rising anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, and attention problems.

And yet we continue forward as if none of it matters.

Technology has given humanity extraordinary tools. It has connected continents, expanded medicine, democratized information, and reshaped the world in ways previous generations could never have imagined. But it has also hollowed something out of us. The people profiting most from these technologies often openly acknowledge their dangers. Executives in Silicon Valley routinely restrict their own children’s access to devices and social media while selling those same products to the public at industrial scale.

We know the damage. We study the damage. We publish papers proving the damage.

And then we do almost nothing about it.

I encountered this same contradiction while studying criminal justice. By the time I entered the classroom, scholars and practitioners had already spent decades demonstrating that many punitive correctional practices were ineffective or outright harmful. Rehabilitation consistently showed better outcomes than purely punitive incarceration in reducing recidivism, yet prison systems across America changed little. In many places, conditions worsened.

We often know what harms us. We simply continue anyway.

The clearest example of technological change I ever witnessed was not in a city. It was in the rural woods of northern Wisconsin.

When I was a kid, my Uncle Mark owned a cattle ranch and ATV dealership up there. He had one of the first “bag phones” I had ever seen. At the time it seemed futuristic beyond belief. My cousin once told me a story about Mark calling ahead from the truck to order a pizza before arriving in town something so novel then that it sounded almost magical.

Now we live in a world where entire economies revolve around food appearing at your door without human interaction.

Cell phones were adopted early in those remote areas out of necessity, but the infrastructure lagged far behind cities. I can still remember driving an ATV onto the top of a water tower just to catch enough signal to make a phone call. Internet access, when it existed at all, was painfully slow dial-up. Rural communities remained culturally insulated because the modern digital world had not fully penetrated them yet.

And because of that, they developed organically.

Without constant exposure to the desires, aesthetics, and anxieties of strangers thousands of miles away, people built culture from what surrounded them. Deer hanging from truck beds during hunting season. Meticulously maintained summer gardens. Local athletics. Fishing stories. Community gossip. Shared rituals. Shared identity.

But eventually the fiber optics arrived. Better cellular networks followed. The same corporations that had spent decades burying cables beneath cities expanded outward into the last disconnected spaces.

And suddenly even the smallest rural towns became illuminated by the same glow.

Faces illuminated in the dark as the Burdi Brothers said in “Me More Cowboy Than You”

The desires changed. Attention shifted away from the immediate world toward an endless stream of manufactured aspiration. Rural communities that once produced distinct identities slowly absorbed the same homogenized culture that dominates everywhere else.

What still draws me back to places like northern Wisconsin is not nostalgia alone. It is the feeling of being known.

In small communities there is a strange comfort in recognition. A sense that people see one another not as profiles, brands, or algorithms but as actual human beings embedded in a place. For someone with an overactive mind, places like this offer relief. The noise quiets.

As a child, I believed northern Wisconsin existed in some magical vacuum unlike anywhere else on Earth. Years later, returning home from another trip north, I found myself dreading the flight back east. Sitting beside me on the plane was an older man who listened patiently as I talked about leaving behind the lakes, forests, and wilderness.

Then he laughed softly and asked:

“Don’t you know Pennsylvania has all that too?”

At first I was almost offended by the suggestion. But he was right.

Only a short drive from my home were roads leading into the heart of the Appalachian Trail. There were mountains, forests, rivers, abandoned industrial relics, dirt tracks, wildlife, and hidden communities I had ignored my entire life because I assumed beauty only existed somewhere else.

I remembered touring the coal regions near Centralia, the nearly abandoned town consumed for decades by an underground mine fire that still burns today. Smoke rose from cracked earth beside abandoned highways covered in graffiti and decay. There was tragedy there, but also an eerie beauty evidence of how communities rise and collapse around industry.

I discovered places like Blue Mountain and the wooded lands surrounding Lehigh University, landscapes full of wildlife and trails that rivaled the North Woods I idolized as a child.

And then there was the Sportsman’s Club.

Hidden behind dirt roads and locked gates near the Lehigh River, it became one of the most meaningful places in my life. The men there are rough around the edges laborers, hunters, drinkers, smokers, survivors. But they possessed something increasingly rare: authenticity.

There was no performance. No curated identity. No algorithm. Just stories, fires, rivers, hard winters, old jokes, dangerous stupidity, loyalty, and community. Places like this remind you that life is still physical. Real. Immediate.

But isolation also teaches another lesson.

Years ago I stayed alone at my grandmother’s property in Wisconsin while she visited family. It was a large 300 acre property with no neighbors close in any modern sense. At first it felt peaceful beyond words. I sat on the porch overlooking Lake Rita watching bass break the water while woodpeckers hammered dead pines along the shoreline.

Then darkness came. The coyotes began howling. And suddenly my imagination turned against me.

What fascinated me afterward was how quickly loneliness transformed beauty into fear. The wilderness had not changed. I had. I slept beside my grandfather’s old .357 revolver because some ancient instinct convinced me I was vulnerable.

That experience later reminded me of a line from Christopher McCandless, whose story inspired the film Into the Wild:

“Happiness is only real when shared.”

People romanticize isolation until they truly encounter it. The truth is that places derive much of their beauty from the people we experience them with.

In recent years I have traveled through parts of America I had never seen before Indianapolis, Frankfort, Charleston, and down through the mountains into North Carolina.

Instead of rushing from destination to destination, I slowed down. And everywhere I went felt strangely familiar.

The hills of the Daniel Boone National Forest reminded me of Pennsylvania. Parts of Kentucky reminded me of Wisconsin. Touring Buffalo Trace Distillery somehow felt emotionally connected to my time working in my family's sawmill despite the industries being entirely different.

Strip away the details and many American communities share the same bones: labor, pride, hardship, landscape, memory, and survival. We simply fail to see the beauty nearby because familiarity blinds us to it.

I learned that lesson again through my cousin, an exceptionally talented photographer from northern Wisconsin. During one visit to Pennsylvania, I took him through abandoned steel mills, old industrial towns, Philadelphia streets, forests, and forgotten places I had learned to appreciate only recently myself.

Months later he told me he felt trapped living in northern Wisconsin and dreamed of traveling somewhere “beautiful” to focus on photography. I realized then I had become the man from the airplane.

I reminded him that people travel from all over the country to see the forests, waterfalls, trout streams, and shorelines he considered ordinary. That with openness and attention, beauty becomes almost unavoidable. Now photographs he took of the Milky Way and frozen lakes hang on my office walls as reminders. Not of distant places. But of the extraordinary nature of what already surrounds us.

Modern life conditions us to overlook reality in pursuit of abstraction.

We chase digital validation while ignoring sunsets outside our windows. We consume endless content about other people’s lives while neglecting our own communities. We allow screens to mediate our experiences until we forget what direct presence even feels like.

But the antidote is still available. It exists in forests, rivers, conversations around fires, local stories, dirt roads, old friends, mountain trails, and communities that still remember how to gather without needing a screen between them.

The beauty we search for elsewhere often exists just beyond our own backyards. The tragedy is not that these places are gone. It is that so many people have forgotten how to see them.