Our brains and eyes were *not* evolved to look at screens. Our finger tips, with those lovely whorls and ridges called finger prints, developed to pick beans, not for touch screens. Our bodies are built with vitamins, minerals, proteins, and carbohydrates, not with glass and silicone. We can’t eat the bits in a computer. And our computerized companions are not yet able to pick beans without us.
If you’ve ever foraged for mushrooms, there is a similar phenomena; you don’t see any at first. You start off with optimism, that quickly leads to disappointment when you don’t see any right away. Sometimes you can be standing in the forest for 20 minutes, not finding anything but rotten wood and false leads. And then you see one. When your eyes finally catch the differences between that pretty orange Chanterelle Mushroom and the dark black background of the forest floor, you suddenly see them everywhere. They seem to have appeared right before your eyes where there were none just moments before.
Our eyes and our brains evolved to do that, too. This is pure magic, the ability for our brains to spot things that are advantageous to us, but only after getting used to the surroundings. This is the magic that kept our ancestors alive during winter blizzards, spotting snowshoe hairs against a snowy background or looking for dirty tubers digging in dirty dirt. Our eyes have the ability to sort out importance from background noise.
But more to the point, when you are in the midst of the hunt, whether for beans or bunnies, the experience of your eyes adjusting to the natural state of the world is a feeling that can’t be described as anything but mystical. It’s an astounding realization that floods your awareness. It’s a notion that the world around you—the world that has always fed you and kept you alive—is a place of wonder and mystery, not just a place to take resources and leave poison. This doesn’t happen in a grocery store.
We know that the climate is changing, the bees are dying, the harvests are being ignored due to politics and policies that cannot be controlled by anyone who isn’t a billionaire. But humans historically are brilliantly scrappy fuckers. We consistently figure out how to survive as a species through tough times. At one point in our history, we were down to 700 individuals on this planet. And now look at how many asses we can seat at the table. Somewhere around 9 billion, right?
Our ancestors knew how to plant and grow and harvest beans. They assumed, wisely, that their offspring would need to know how to plant and grow and harvest beans, so they passed that information down to the next generation. And that worked pretty well up until the dawn of the Internet. At that point, we forgot how to plant and grow and harvest things in our own memories because we had machines that would remember it for us…and we got lazy.
The price of that laziness is that we also forgot how to look for beans, or mushrooms, or snow hares. And we are missing the mystical mystery of the world that we adjust to when we are searching for meaning on a naturally camouflaging background.
It’s better than the hidden pictures in your kid’s magazine. It’s better than a Where’s Waldo poster. It’s better than sorting through any video game on a screen, because it comes with scent and somatic touch. It’s what humans are evolved to do because that’s how our ancestors were able to feed themselves.
Do yourself a favor. Walk away from the screens for a while, and go pick something in a vegetable garden. Allow your eyes to adjust to the colors and textures and smells and feels of a harvest. It’ll change the way you look at the world, literally.