I spend a lot of time staring at screens. My job requires me to spend my days staring at computer screens, and my ambitions tack on a few hours more. To relax, I typically look for a television screen. I probably do somewhat better than some of my colleagues, though; I camp, hike, fish, take walks, tend a garden, and generally seek out a connection with a more-than-human world that people I work with consider something between a quirky hobby and a bizarre obsession. Still, I think I know how Linda Buzzell would diagnose my periodic bouts of depression and anxiety. Co-editor with Craig Chalquist of the new anthology Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, just released by Sierra Club Books (May 2009), she describes how she approaches patients with similar complaints. “I ask them to keep a time-journal in which they record the hours and minutes spent each day outside, as well as the hours spent inside in front of a screen. My clients are often shocked to realize how disassociated they have become from nature and our species’ natural ways of living, and the effect this disconnection is having on their psyche. In fact, a 2007 study from the University of Essex shows that a daily ‘dose’ of walking outside in nature can be as effective at treating mild to moderate depression as expensive antidepressant medications that can sometimes have negative side-effects.”

Ecopsychology has recently revealed many of the ways in which our isolation from a more-than-human world has diminished us psychologically, creating depression, anxiety, and worse effects—but also how quickly and easily reconnecting with that world helps to heal us. Just playing in the dirt can improve your mood, and your health. Even a little bit of green in your life can improve your mood, your ability to perform cognitive tasks, even your ability to control your emotions—and, according to Richard Fuller from the University of Queensland, the more species involved, the greater the benefits. “We worry a lot about the effects of urbanization on other species,” Fuller says. “But we’re also affected by it. That’s why it’s so important to invest in the spaces that provide us with some relief.” The constant self-reflection of the city rots our brains; even seeing a photograph of a busy city street hurts us enough to produce measurable differences in our ability to think and deal with the world.

So, why do we have so much trouble finding time to spend in a more-than-human world, with such wide and immediate effects? Almost unanimously, we hear television, movies and video games as the answer—”videophilia“, to use the handy term coined by Oliver Pergams and Patricia Zaradic, in contrast to biophilia, the term coined by E.O. Wilson to describe the instinctual love of life that seems to lie at the base of so many of those connections that ecopsychology has begun to reveal. Looking at dropping visits to National Parks, they found four reasons:

1. Time spent on the internet
2. Time spent playing video games
3. Time spent watching movies (both in theaters & at home)
4. Oil prices

Eliezer Yudkowsky recently wrote about “superstimuli.” For example, “A candy bar matches taste buds that evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment, but it matches those taste buds much more strongly than anything that actually existed in the hunter-gatherer environment. The signal that once reliably correlated to healthy food has been hijacked, blotted out with a point in tastespace that wasn’t in the training dataset—an impossibly distant outlier on the old ancestral graphs.” He argues that electronic media act the same way. At least three people have died while playing video games—because they would not log off to eat or sleep. More have lost spouses and jobs. Yudkowsky also points to the portrayal of women in the media, emphasizing healthy traits to the point of caricature, beyond anything that any flesh-and-blood women could actually match. “And likewise,” he writes, “a video game can be so much more engaging than mere reality, even through a simple computer monitor, that someone will play it without food or sleep until they literally die.”

Wait—doesn’t this all give us a big, knotted contradiction, though? After all, exposure to nature makes us feel better, and all this time in front of screens makes us feel depressed—but the thing that makes us feel depressed somehow delivers a super-concentrated dose that the other thing, the thing that makes us feel better, just can’t match? I’ve played a lot of video games in my time—yes, including World of Warcraft—but more engaging than reality? Certainly not! Maybe I have a unique experience, but I’ve always experienced video games as the palest knock-offs of the real things, mediocre imitations at best, acceptable only when I don’t really have access to the genuine article—never in its place.

I’d like to make what seems from my reading like a radical case: that we can’t explain this away simply by calling ourselves or our children dumb, selfish, or indulgent. After all, these things help us, so why would we turn away from the very things that make us feel better, even in the immediate term?

In my own experience, I didn’t play video games because I preferred them to the outside world; I played them because I couldn’t go outside, or at least not very far. David Derbyshire writes about the experience of a family in Sheffield that rings true with my own. In 1926, at the age of 8, George Thomas walked six miles to his favorite fishing hole. In 1950, his future son-in-law, Jack Hattersley, then 8, walked a mile to the woods. In 1979, Jack’s daughter, Vicky, age 8, could walk to the local swimming pool a half-mile away. She allows her son, Ed—age 8 in 2007—to walk only 300 yards, to the end of their street.

Traffic plays a role. In 1926, George Thomas did not have to cross any heavy traffic along his six-mile jaunt. Just as the criss-cross of roads has fragmented animal habitat, hemming animals into ever-smaller spaces, so, too, has it hemmed in the natural habitat of the First World child. But parental fears have also played their part. Fearing abduction and strangers in an increasingly fragmented community, parents get nervous letting their children roam about unsupervised. George’s parents probably knew many of the people who lived along his six-mile route, neighbors and friends who would keep an eye out on the boy. To Ed’s parents, Sheffield likely looks more like a dense collection of strangers—perhaps even mostly benevolent, but surely hiding some with less than pure intentions.

Even a child with parents who can recognize the value of contact with a more-than-human world and removes those restrictions will likely come inside: after all, where can he find his friends? Even if your own parents do not fit this mold, the parents of your friends most likely will.

We seek community, and in an increasingly isolated world, we find that most readily electronically. Even here, amidst people who hope to rewild, we rarely find community in the flesh, so we turn on our computers and log online in the hopes of finding others we can connect with. I do not believe that electronic media present us with a more engaging experience than the more-than-human world. Far from it. But I do believe, and have personally experienced, how electronic media can overcome our increasing social isolation and put us in contact with one another, giving us forums and blogs and online communities and social networks that give us the palest imitation of the genuine, deep community we yearn for.

The discourse I hear over and over again when it comes to getting children outside or the effects of our ever more digital world blames us for failing to engage in the activities that will make us healthier, happier, and more prosperous, citing our self-indulgence and laziness. I think this gets the problem almost precisely backwards; after all, if self-indulgent, wouldn’t we indulge the things that make us healthier, happier, and more prosperous? We don’t disengage from the more-than-human world because of our selfishness or laziness, but because we lack those things so much! We have such a willingness to work hard and sacrifice our bodies, our minds, and our futures, that we will slave away in front of monitors for hours on end. The 40-hour work week has given way to the 50- or 80-hour work week. Add on 100 hours a year for commuting, on average, and we have precious little time left for ourselves. The exhaustion of engaging this economy leaves us drained of any time or energy for anything else, and we accept it. For fear of losing our jobs, for fear of what might happen without the right insurance, for fear of seeing our lives shattered by crippling debt if anything should go wrong in the perilous system we’ve made for ourselves, ripped from its social context. We don’t have the time or energy it takes to create real community, so social isolation intensifies—which, in turn, intensifies our fear of all the things that might happen to us if we do lose our economic lifeline, because more and more, we face those perils alone.

We need more self-indulgence; we need more laziness. We need to demand more, not less—more health, more happiness, more prosperity, more connection, more community. Some have called it ironic or even hypocritical to have websites discussing rewilding; I call it starting with what you have at hand. We can’t explain our poverty in terms of our selfishness. We impoverish ourselves not because video games deliver to us an experience more “real” than real; we accept it because we see it as our best option. Telling people who’ve accepted this to not indulge themselves so much sends exactly the wrong message. We need to indulge more, in the things that we really want. We need to stop compromising.