When I was coming of age in the 90s, I remember experiencing some wholly perfect moments. Homework finished, weekend plans solidified, my dad affectionately teasing me across the kitchen table. Everything was as it should be. There was absolutely nothing wrong.

I realize that sensation may only be accessible to a child, specifically one lucky enough to be raised in a calm, loving home. I wonder if any adults, ever in history, have been able to let their minds settle. To look around and really believe, even for a moment, that everything is ok. 

But I know today, even when the house is reset, the bills are paid, and my body is spent from a day outside with friends in the sun,  there is an aching insistence nothing is as it should be. That everything is deeply and irrevocably wrong.

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Digital wellbeing is so often synonymous with boundary-setting. Unplugging for the weekend. Sleeping with your phone in the other room. No screens while eating. Years spent in this field, I’ve implemented most of these. But no matter how much distance I create between myself and my screens, I still don’t feel well. 

The longer I sit with this, the clearer it becomes: living alongside technology isn’t just about taking breaks. It’s about managing the effects that linger long after we log off-  about actively tending to our worldviews, our sense of hope and the immense grief and fear we carry.

So much of this project has circled around “too much knowing”,  how to stay sane when you’re aware of every current and pending atrocity happening everywhere in the world, all at once. We are relentlessly confronted by horrific, often sensationalized news. Immersed in algorithms designed to surface the most fearful, attention gripping narratives, accompanied by threads containing the most nihilistic takes imaginable.

If it’s not the climate collapse, it’s the immigrants, or the reptilian death cults, or the tick-borne bioweapons that will ultimately bring about our demise.

While we may disagree on who or what is to blame, we’ve actually reached a very rare point of cultural consensus: things are collapsing, systems are failing, and humans and life as we know it are probably, definitely, doomed. It’s why so many of the people pulling the strings are investing in space colonization, consciousness uploading, or bunkers at the very least.

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I’ve come to realize, at least for me, that one of the deepest sources of this ambient dread is something more specific: the knowledge that if and when the systems as we know them collapse, as we all seem to agree they will,  I have almost none of the skills required to survive without technological or institutional assistance.

Tech now mediates almost every aspect of modern life, and every convenience we’ve adopted has eroded some layer of basic human self-sufficiency. AI is the most glaring recent example. For many people, researching and writing already feels like an impossible task without it, even though we were all doing it unaided just a couple of years ago. But this diminishing of skills has been happening for years. How would I meet up with friends without texting? Navigate anywhere without GPS? Find an electrician without reading reviews? Feed myself when I’m tired and uninspired without DoorDash?

Following that logic into darker territory: if the grid actually went down, how would I find food? Water? Keep my family safe and warm?

We’re drowning in evidence that the world is ending and yet we’ve outsourced almost all of our abilities to the very systems we’re watching fall apart. What a perfect recipe for existential paralysis.

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We could go into the political incentives to keeping us in this frozen state of nihilism, but rather than rehash this well trod territory, I think the more important questions are: what can we actually do? And how will it feel once we start?

Every small step towards reskilling compounds. Mending a shirt. A ceramics class. An herb garden. These things build confidence, a felt sense , however naive, of being slightly less at the mercy of what’s coming. Our survivalist friends weren’t wrong. But before buying a dozen chickens, talking to your neighbors is the most accessible place to begin. There is a faction of prepper culture built around the isolated individual, often with a deep distrust of others. But we are, at our most fundamental, communal creatures and community-building is a far more joyful and time-tested strategy for resilience. And even with the best equipped farm, we won’t make it far on our own.

So to start, it’s about asking: What are your natural skills and strong suits? And how can you offer them to the people immediately around you?

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Alongside bricking my phone daily and consciously restricting my use of  AI, I’ve been working on my relationship with technology in ways I wasn’t always conscious of. I’ve moved to a smaller town, closer to nature, with the kind of close-knit community I’ve never experienced before. 

I also recently signed up for my first permaculture course, a journey I plan to document for this project. I am an optimist at heart and I hope to never actually use the skills I learn here in any meaningful way. But the idea that I’m able to is a sort of cognitive salve, that’s done more for mental state than years of journaling, yoga, meditating etc. 

It’s somewhat antithetical to the famous quote “we’re human beings not human doings”. The doing, something, anything, to reskill and reconnect with the people and world around me feels absolutely critical for my wellbeing right now.

The heaviness of knowing doesn’t go away. But what’s shifting for me is the feeling of complete exposure, the sense that I’m entirely passive in the face of it. This also informs my belief on the future of digital wellbeing: it won’t just be about limiting our time on screens, but building a life and mind sturdy enough to carry the weight of what they’ve shown us.