Life in 2D: how we've traded real world experiences for the convenience of a home and screen-based life

For a few months this summer, I had an extended stay in a part of the country that deals with extreme heat, making it hard to walk outside consistently. So to avoid melting, I tried to substitute my daily walks with a treadmill. Physically, there was almost no difference, but how I felt afterward couldn’t be more different. One of the reasons I go for walks is that it grounds you in the world and the moment as you move through your surroundings. After a walk, I feel clear, calm, and connected. My time on a treadmill was anything but that. Instead, I felt stuck, clamoring for anything to distract me from the present moment, trying to drown out the noise and clutter. There was no peace to be found as I anxiously waited for the timer to hit zero. I got the same number of steps in but none of the other benefits of walking were there. Interactive platforms like Peloton do their best to resolve this but ultimately, they fall flat. Sure there are instructors who you may know and love, but they have no idea you’re there. The same goes for the nameless classmates pedaling behind them and the phantom usernames you’re chasing on the leaderboards. None of this is to say that riding an indoor bike or using a treadmill is a waste of time. For some of us, it’s the only way we can move our bodies, but they are examples of how we’ve traded real-life experiences for convenience. 

Our lives are more hectic than ever, and it makes things a lot easier now that we can do so much from home and our phones. All you really need for most of your needs is an internet connection. I don’t know what any of us would do if we couldn’t rely on all of the ways life has gotten more convenient over the past 20 years. I myself would be lost if I couldn’t work out from home or take online classes. Yet, I can’t shake the feeling our lives are smaller because of this. We’re losing our dimensionality because our existence has been confined to staring at walls and screens. One of the inspirations for this blog is my long-fought battle with screen time. Despite my best efforts, I’d be lying if I said that many of my daily “experiences” weren’t on my phone or laptop. For many of us, scrolling is the hobby of choice, living our lives through the user experience of our favorite app. Instead of creating our own rich and embodied moments, we spend our time looking at screenshots of the lives of others. Work is the same, with 40 hours a week spent moving bits and bytes of information that have no real physical presence. We then stay on our screens to determine where to eat, rather than exploring the world for ourselves. Delivery apps even let us skip the step of ever interacting with the restaurant in the first place. Now, we even have ghost kitchens, which strip away all of the nuances of a restaurant and only make food to send out via app. Just like everything else we buy online, we have no idea where any of it comes from except for the foggy outline of a nondescript warehouse somewhere in the world. That last sentence could be a metaphor for most of modern life as our experiences continue to lose their shine. 

While our lives are easier, that’s not the only reason things have become so two-dimensional. We live in an incredibly bleak economic system, where everything that can be monetized will. That’s a lot easier to do when everything takes place on a screen. Companies have direct access to you, so all that you see or do can become a product. Peloton doesn’t just sell you the bike, you also have to buy a subscription to classes. Everywhere you look there’s an incentive to move as much of our lives as possible onto apps and machines, just think about how many more subscriptions you have now than even five years ago. This leads to fewer opportunities to have real experiences and a more automated life. I think about how as soon as we need anything, we just open the Amazon app and click “buy now” without any hesitation. The experience is meant to be so frictionless that there’s no thinking. An algorithm tells us what to do and we do it. It makes companies successful because they essentially have a captive audience. It also leads to a loss of self. We build a sense of self by making choices in our lives, if you don’t have the chance to do that then you stop growing. We also grow by experiencing all of the random events and people we encounter in the world. Through every encounter, we learn more about ourselves and who we want to be. That doesn’t happen when we’re stuck at home, trapped in an endless cycle of algorithmic-based consumption. 

A life devoid of real-world experience is also incredibly isolating. I’ve written before about the loneliness epidemic in America, and this is a driving force behind that. This isn’t a referendum on working from home or anything like that. I’m a huge proponent of working from home and having more control over our lives. The flexibility of the internet era has allowed us to do so much, but an unintended consequence of that is that all of the small interactions are gone. It’s hard to miss paying bills in person, but I do think many of us miss the other moments of connection. Moments like a chance to bond with your favorite clerk at a local store have since been replaced with the anonymous knock of an Amazon driver. There are countless other examples like this where the connection has been swapped out for hollow replacements. A two-minute conversation with a stranger may seem inconsequential but it serves a purpose in rooting us in our community and the present. They remind us we’re part of something bigger, without them our lives become small and abstracted. Think about life from the third person, 20 years ago you’d follow yourself moving about the world, having small but meaningful interactions with all sorts of people, now it’s just you alone tapping away on a phone or laptop. 

Whether we like it or not we’re part of the world. Our brains are wired to take in the richness of everything around us and turn it into our lived experience. When we stop experiencing the world, our lives simply become a means to an end. It’s all just mindless actions with no real-world significance. As cliche as it sounds, life is about the journey. All of those little moments that may be inconvenient are what lives are made of. They are the story. We can’t chop them up into little pieces meant to be sold and automated. Life isn’t scrolling through Uber Eats, it’s discovering a secret bar upstairs of Pho restaurant. Driving across town for a bowl of soup can be annoying, but doing so opens the door for so many things to happen. It’s not lost on me that many people don’t have the luxury to visit restaurants or try in-person classes, but meaningful experiences don’t have to cost anything. You can cook a meal with a loved one, or sit down to play a game with friends. Sometimes it’s as simple as going outside and leaving your devices behind. 

While most of us aren’t spending all day alone on our phones, we can see life losing its color. Yet, despite being pulled into these frictionless digital and physical silos, I think many of us also feel a pull in the other direction. I felt that as I stared at that pockmarked beige wall in my apartment gym. Something was missing from my experience, something I found when I started walking outside again. I didn’t care how hot it was, I needed to be in the world. Being part of something bigger melted away the tension created by the endless treadmill conveyor belt. I also gained a new appreciation for where I lived as I saw the community go about its day-to-day. I get that same feeling every time I sit down at a restaurant and see life happen around me. Those are real experiences. I’m not perfect, most days you can find me scrolling too much and working out alone in my apartment, but I’m trying to experience the world and all it has to offer. At the end of the day what makes us human is our experience, we can’t waste that. Let’s reenter the world, you never know what’s out there.