- 07 Nov, 2025 *
Over ten years ago your mother and I went on a trip to Denali Park in Alaska. It’s a wild place teeming with wildlife, and the biggest threat to people is moose. An Alaskan Moose is the biggest of all subspecies at 1,400 pounds and nearly 7 feet tall. Our tour guide shared a story of a tourist who got too close to a moose to take a selfie, and was kicked in the head. As paramedics loaded her into an ambulance, she pulled out her phone to live narrate a video about the experience.
I’ve seen a similar trend over the last ten years: tourists who die taking selfies. Around 500 people have died taking a selfie. That’s 0.0001% of the 5B smartphone users in the world, but it tells us something about our perception of reality.
As our lives have become more digital, mor…
- 07 Nov, 2025 *
Over ten years ago your mother and I went on a trip to Denali Park in Alaska. It’s a wild place teeming with wildlife, and the biggest threat to people is moose. An Alaskan Moose is the biggest of all subspecies at 1,400 pounds and nearly 7 feet tall. Our tour guide shared a story of a tourist who got too close to a moose to take a selfie, and was kicked in the head. As paramedics loaded her into an ambulance, she pulled out her phone to live narrate a video about the experience.
I’ve seen a similar trend over the last ten years: tourists who die taking selfies. Around 500 people have died taking a selfie. That’s 0.0001% of the 5B smartphone users in the world, but it tells us something about our perception of reality.
As our lives have become more digital, more of our lives are abstracted from reality. I write this not on pad and paper — which is already abstracted from my thoughts, which are abstracted from experience — but on a computer screen, clacking away at my keyboard. For many people, their social lives have moved from seeing and talking to real people, now online on social media. Increasingly people have no friends, no families, and no real connection. 12% of children in 2024 said their dream job was Youtube streamer, and fewer people are getting married and having kids than at any time in history.
As engrossing as our digital lives can be, we’re biological animals. We crave physical reality, and it governs us. Our relationship to reality matters, as do our relationships with other people. Having self awareness plants us firmly in our own reality. Doing so is the only way to reliably understand what’s happening and influence the outcome.
In the political landscape of 2025, it’s said that what matters is what people believe, not what’s true. That may be true for winning short term elections, but it’s a terrible outlook on life, much less public service. If people believe that vaccines are harmful and they don’t get their kids vaccinated, children die of small pox regardless of their parents’ beliefs. If people believe the wrong things, we get Pizza Gate and other demonstrations of stupidity.
Our reality is physical, social, and spiritual in nature. Our digital reality is an abstraction, and a bad one at that. It represents something true, but not truth. Physical reality, on the other hand, is shared and laid bare for us to experience together.
Your mother and I decided early on that we wanted you to be in a Montessori school for pre-K. The emphasis on the physical and social worlds was the deciding factor. We wanted you to understand the physical world and how it works. We wanted you to spend your time playing with other kids.
It’s a daily struggle to live a predominantly digital life while maintaining a connection to reality, lest our perception of reality become too abstracted, and too far from the truth.
My advice: stay off social media, talk to people face to face, do something outside every day, and meditate.