Don’t Tell Us to Go Outside
When life doesn't come with a backyard, a girls’ weekend, or PTO, online is the community center
There’s this smug tone people get when they say it:
“Oh, I’m not on social media.”
“I’m never online.”
”I don’t check my notifications.”
“Look at these people: Perpetually/terminally online.”
Like the internet isn’t where most of us live now.
It’s the digital age, 96% of U.S. adults use the internet.
For most people, especially those in poverty, the internet isn't just a luxury—it's a vital tool for work, education, and social connection.
Like we're supposed to treat comment sections like some kind of digital fracas we’re too classy to acknowledge, but can’t look away from.
fra·cas /ˈfrākəs,ˈfrakəs/ noun
a noisy disturbance or quarrel. "the fracas was broken up by stewards"
As if we're serfs and peasants versus lords and ladies, screaming in the square while they sip wine on the terrace. Judging. Always judging. Critiquing how we dress, what we say, how we say it, how we engage with our peers.
But here’s the thing:
The internet is the town square. The family newsletter. The digital town library.
It’s also the grocery store, the community center, the break room, the protest, the baby book, the suicide hotline, the wedding toast, the only safe space some people ever get to enter. When you can’t travel to your nieces wedding, but you can scroll through her pictures & like each one. Dropping photos from when they were young when they share the new baby’s latest pics.
We use this phrase: “Meet people where they are.” as if we mean it. As if we’re willing to ‘get down in the muck’ of people deemed less than. But, invariably, we shame people for their station in life. As if silver spoons are passed out to everyone.
The average monthly internet bill is around $78, making it a significant part of many households' budgets & their sole entertainment budget for the month
Whether it’s disability, caregiving, rural broadband, poverty, racism, queerness, gender safety, or just a crushing lack of options—there are tens of millions of people for whom online life is the only public square they can access without begging for rides, childcare, or accommodations that never come.
It’s not a side thing.
It is the thing.
Everyone bemoans the cost of things these days, without understanding that many are simply priced out of the things we take for granted. Gone are the days of $1 movie tickets. The average cost of a movie ticket is $14 (times a family of 4 = $56), gas is $4.50 a gallon, parking, tolls, etc. Meanwhile, the internet bill is everything—school, work, play, survival.
There are no concerts.
No girls’ weekends.
No France.
“Only about 40% of Americans took a vacation in the past year—and over half of those who didn’t say it was because they couldn’t afford it.”
(Source: Pew/Travel Industry Association)
No Disneyland.
No private yurt retreat in the forest with curated organic vegan gluten free granola and a playlist named “Healing.”
You know what “outside” looks like for a lot of us?
Access to safe outdoor spaces isn't universal. Many people in the United States live in neighborhoods with high rates of violence, unsafe air or water, and other health and safety risks.
Putting your baby in a laundry basket just to get to the laundry room several flights of stairs down & then lugging them back up again IS cardio, tyvm.
Standing in line at a 7-Eleven bathroom with a child who gets carsick after 20 minutes in the rental car makes that even local’ish activities a challenge.
Staring out the window at your neighbors’ fenced-in yards from a 4th-floor apartment with no elevator and no stroller that fits the stairs.
I grew up scrambling through barbed wire fences, running across fields avoiding angry cows to shorten the distance between friends houses. I’ve stumbled on pot grows and masked militia with unchained guard dogs. Our mountains and forests weren’t equipped with benches to rest on, carefully laid stairs to climb up or down. I see your “hiking” and remember scrambling up & down bluffs over the Pacific Ocean to body surf or collect agates as a child. But my life wasn’t the norm. Not everyone spends summers on private jets & winters living off food you canned from the yard and outhouses when you spend the night at a classmate whose family lives in a barn. Not a converted fancy loft experience cottage core vibe. Actual barn, with animals in it & beds on dirt floors with puddles.
That’s being poor rurally. Poverty isn’t bound by geography. Some of us can’t escape the outside, while others only have access to tiny manicured sidewalk spaces, at best.
Approximately 80 million Americans live in multi-family buildings, which often lack private green spaces like backyards. The Department of Energy's Energy.gov
🏘️ Housing Affordability Crisis
Let’s face it, a lot of us are never going to own homes. Americans need to, on average, earn well over $100k a year—meanwhile the current median household income is about $84,000. Axios (gentle reminder that median means a substantial number of people live on LESS than $84k a year - SSI recipients (nearly 8 million Americans) avg $941 a month as an example, that’s roughly $11k. A year. To live on.)
This disparity highlights the growing challenges in achieving financial stability and upward mobility. Breaking free of intergenerational poverty is getting harder, not easier. By design. And even those with the best of intentions plays into this culture of judgement and condemnation.
This idea of “perpetually online” as a class signifier is absurd. Trad wives are applauded for spending hours baking their own breakfast cereal, but the mom who lets their kids watch PBS while they get ready are parenting wrong?
Some of us are just fighting off being bored in that dangerous way that happens when you're broke and stuck. Some of us are stuck surrounded by people who don’t look like us, who don’t face our struggles and online is how we know we’re not alone.
Some of us are lonely, or would be, if we didn’t have this digital world to wander through. Some of us are isolated by poverty, by our bodies, by our responsibilities that we cannot outsource to others for convenience. When ‘grabbing lunch’ involves risking not being home when your kids bus drops them off, catching up online is the more responsible choice.
Don’t tell me to reconnect with nature when I had to fight hard to live somewhere close enough to pediatric specialists to keep my child alive. I’ve slept on the ground out of necessity, not some glamping trip in yurts for Instagram cred. Being stranded without transportation isn’t the same as choosing to ‘go off grid’ for a few days.
You’re cosplaying as rural folk while looking down your nose at us for access to any perks you deem unnecessary even though you rely on them yourselves. It’s, perhaps, startling to know how many people don’t realize that ‘being online’ and using social media are two distinct things. That person staring at their phone, would you be less dismissive if they were watching the news? Catching up on their favorite sports team? Checking their home security cameras? Why is it some people feel qualified to be the arbiters of how someone else uses their time?
"With 83% of Americans using at least one video-on-demand service, many find their primary connection to entertainment and community online." Times Union
This is where we take classes.
Where we build friend groups. We join survivors forums. We finally find the name our rural, underpaid, overworked ER doctors never named after decades of being triaged only for emergency medical needs.
Where we find medical studies and case files and solidarity. We unlock resources we’ve been systemically paywalled from our whole lives.
Where we organize our strikes, our campaigns, our mutual aid drives.
Therapy costs $, processing your trauma through support groups & research is priceless.
🧠 Rethinking Societal Expectations
Given all of this, it's past time to reconsider societal narratives that promote "logging off" or "touching grass" as universal solutions to all ills. For many, the internet serves as a primary means of connection, education, and even survival. Outdoor activities, while beneficial, aren't always feasible due to safety concerns or time constraints. Accessibility is not a universal feature, despite the optics of a world friendly to those needing access.
We’ve seen this historically too. People were discouraged from becoming “bookworms” and told all that reading would “rot their brains”, especially the womenfolk. We saw it with “couch potato” rhetoric slamming people for? How they choose to spend their down time? As if rest must be earned & being poor is proof you’re not trying hard enough? The petty ways we refer to what’s popular, from the Kardashians to Crime TV has to stop. Dismissing what brings others joy or relief from their every day stresses. Do sand art Youtube videos help you let go of your work day before arriving home? Do you use nature sound videos to help your child regulate their emotions in a chaotic setting? All this talk of “screen time” as if anything digital is inherently less than when compared to ‘real life’. Whose real life?
Late one Saturday night a couple years ago, I was pondering how many people like me didn’t go to prom. So I asked, on my personal Twitter account (pre-Elon! - but if you choose to stay because Twitter is where you find community, you do you, boo, no shade) “Did you go to prom?”
Cue the trolls. One in particular, stands out. A self-described cinephile took GREAT offense, screenshotting & retweeting, long furious screeds chastising me for being frivolous when there were so many more important things to discuss. Shutting down all casual conversation in the thread. Obscure dubbed films from the 40’s were worthy of spending time on, according to his feed, but heaven forbid someone want to talk about something casual, ever.
Another time, I’d posted something about the generational trauma General Hospital had inflicted on our developing minds with the redemption arch of Luke of ‘Luke & Laura’ fame. For those unaware, Luke was first introduced as a villain. When he meets Laura, he’s so “overtaken” that he rapes her. But, you see, their love was so powerful, she healed him & their wedding was one of the most watched TV events in the 80’s.
And, again, the conversation was stifled by a woman who was just IRATE, that how dare I post that without researching to find that she herself had said something about it a few years prior. Attacking us again & again for “rehashing” something SHE felt had been settled. Her mindset was that it was “woke” to examine whether or not showcasing to an entire generation that a woman marrying her abuser is ultimately romantic & his prior acts just proof of his love for her.
Not everyone sees what you see. Not everyone reads what you write. Yet the pearl clutchers are so quick to pounce if you use a meme with the word “fuck” in it, or laugh at a meme they feel is in poor taste. As if opinions are right or wrong, true or false, rather than an intriguing glimpse into another perspective. News articles are written by small town hacks criticizing a local community member for what they reacted to online. As if responding is approval. As if reposting is agreement & not “did you see what I saw?” to most users. The tiny percent of pearl clutchers are policing what the rest of us see to the point of objecting to us reacting to it. You can share something solely because you want to. It’s not a press release. It’s not an endorsement. If you “like” a newspaper article about an apartment fire, you’re not saying “I LIKE this fire! Yay!” Nor should you be attacked for the instinctive response of interacting with something based on what someone else might infer from it.
We’re seeing it play out with Jim Comey. He saw some rocks on a beach that were arranged to say: “86 47”. Conflating, perhaps, the usage of “86” which means to kick out or remove someone (think bouncers at a night club) with the California Penal Code “187” that references homicide. Because Comey didn’t anticipate that people would, in bad faith, claim his sharing what he saw with something else entirely, and it’s headlines for days. “He was head of the FBI, he should know I would take it out of context, pretend it means something else & twist it into a death threat.”
“He didn’t commit a crime,” a former prosecutor said. “He gave his enemies an opening.”
Are we even listening to ourselves? When someone objected to the photo, he even removed it. So, are all the news articles with screengrabs ALSO lobbing threats? Will people who speak up to say they didn’t take his post to be a threat also get visited by the Secret Service?
“Understanding and acknowledging these challenges is crucial in fostering empathy and creating inclusive solutions that cater to diverse experiences.”
See how sterile that sounded? Because that’s what we keep insisting on. Oxford commas take precedence over authenticity. Let’s reframe that sentence:
“Don’t be a dick.”
Don’t claim to understand points of view you refuse to look at. Don’t only speak up to lecture other people on what you perceive as their failings or ignorance of topics you’ve centered your life around. Don’t condemn someone else for how they live their lives.
“Roughly 1 in 3 Americans report feeling serious loneliness. For many, the digital landscape is their only connection to community, education, or joy.”
(Source: Harvard’s Making Caring Common report, 2021)
The sneering responses, which aren’t always public. The ‘concerned’ phone call urging someone to be less authentic, ‘for their own good’. The text messages demanding someone mute their voice for your comfort. The “Get outside and touch grass” crowd. Who drop their offerings & preen for the same attention they scorn others for enjoying.
As if depression is a serotonin problem and not a rational response to life. If I see one more, “Ditch the pills & reconnect with nature” meme, my redneck, hippie, tree hugging, beach loving inner Valley Girl is going to be bringing back some 80’s slang. Because, OMG, Becky, people who live on dirt roads are depressed too, like, Fucking A, gag me with a spoon (that I don’t have enough of!)
As if not having a backyard is a personal failure. Or being unable to tend to it yourself is. As if gardening is a universal moral good instead of a time- and land-privileged flex.
As if the rest of us aren’t trying to cram therapy into a lunch break, side hustling until midnight, or paying bills online in a parked car while our toddler naps in the back seat & we wait for school to let out.
For as much hurrying up that modern day life dictates, those without the luxury of funds have to suffer through the wait times. Sit on hold for 45 minutes & fill out reams of documents for daily living. You ever try to cancel your Comcast account? Good luck getting those 3 hours of your life back.
🏞️ Outdoor Activities: Not Always Accessible
Engaging in outdoor activities like hiking is often recommended for mental well-being. As a cure all. Not sure how a babbling brook is going to help me process the childhood trauma I experienced *checks notes* while living in the woods you say will heal me.
Also? Not all neighborhoods offer safe or accessible outdoor spaces. We’re talking high crime rates, lack of green spaces, or inadequate infrastructure, you can’t hike a trail that doesn’t exist. You can’t vacation in places you can’t reach.
Almost 10% (so, roughly 12 million) of American homes do not have their own transportation to even get them to ‘nature’. Or to get themselves out of nature & into towns. Public transportation is an URBAN thing, btw. Even our schools didn’t have buses.
Virtually all families include someone with a disability, these are families juggling multiple responsibilities with limited or zero assistance. So, finding time and resources for leisure? Can be impossible. Not just hard. Say it with me: IM POS SI BLE. No Taxi to get you to traffic court. No walking distance market for foodstuffs. No social services or safety nets. Even your fire dept is volunteer. Hydrants? Those are urban too.
You ever tried “fresh air” when your shift ends after dark and you haven’t seen the sun in three days? Or when your family all has different schedules & joint adventures are a rarity?
“Roughly 16% of Americans work non-daytime shifts—including overnight, rotating, or irregular hours—making daylight and weekend access to outdoor time a logistical impossibility.”
(Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
You ever tried “logging off” when this is the only place you were allowed to exist without feeling like a burden? When your peer group is in the same boat & exhausted without enough time in the day to give to even their most essential needs? When you snatch at 3 to 5 minutes of interactions, with delays & bursts of exchanges often your only opportunity for conversation?
So stop pretending hiking is healing when it’s a resort activity for the able-bodied and time-rich.
Stop acting like staying out of the comments makes you superior, when for some people, those threads are the only place they’ve ever been truly heard. Stop only posting to chastise someone or voice your objection to their perspective.
If you’re posting online & you’re not paying attention to what your circles are saying, you’re engaging in performative socialization. You’re not better than the friends who are liking your pics from the fancy brunch you attended, you just think you are. If you tell people not to tag you lest others know you know each other? Delete your accounts. Also, work on that. You elitist brat.
Your “loser” cousin? The one you cringe when he checks in with you? You’re not allowed to ever lecture someone on family again. If your loved ones posts are beneath you in some manner? Do yourself the favor of muting their accounts. Do THEM the favor of not hate scrolling for things to be upset about. Let it go. Billions of posts a minute are going out, who cares if 46 people see them talking about whatever it is they want to say? It’s not about you, even when it’s about you. You’re eavesdropping on an open terrace of conversations & butting in to reprimand, to shame, to silence people?
Why?
Honest question.
How is spending 30 minutes looking down your nose at people the right way, while spending 3 hours laughing at Panda’s sneezing & Bridgerton fan fics is something to be ashamed of?
I’ve made ride or die friends in the comments. I’ve had entire new worlds open up to me as I’ve expanded my circles beyond just those I know in real life. If you start spouting off words like para-social relationships to devalue the real connections many of us are making, congratulations, you are the problem.
“Nearly 60% of Americans say they couldn't afford a $400 emergency expense. In that kind of financial reality, boredom isn’t a luxury—it’s an economic trap.”
(Source: Federal Reserve 2023 Economic Well-Being Report)
Y’all act like you want to “understand the working class” but can’t stand it when we show up.
Like we’re ants in a farm you poke at when you're bored, just to see what we'll do.
Here’s a thought:
Stop telling people to escape.
Because for a lot of us, this is where we get to scream, cry, laugh, rage, learn, and survive.
But we've ceded the platforms to hate.
We’ve let trolls and elitists and bots run wild.
And the rest of us? We got quiet. Tired.
Ashamed of how much time we spend here.
Worried someone will mock our typos or our timestamps or our tone.
Scared of being “too much” or “not enough.”
But the internet isn’t less real than your backyard or that National Park you frequent 2x a year.
It just doesn’t have as many fences, the trails aren’t so steep we can’t safely traverse them. There’s always an accessible bathroom. You’re never ‘out of range’ of connection on your terms.
So maybe don’t tell people to “just go outside.”
Especially not from your mountain Airbnb. Especially not when we have a housing crisis & you’re Zooming in from your 2nd home. Especially from that foreign beach where you’re lounging.
Today’s Assignment:
If you’re a regular reader, you know what I’m gonna say:
Show up more. Judge less.
Stop assuming everyone uses this place the same way you do.
Read the comment threads. Respond with compassion.
Don’t police people for being online at 3am like there’s some correct time to exist on the 24/7 machine that never shuts off.
Your comfort is not the standard.
Your schedule is not universal.
Join the conversation anyway.
You need us more than we need you. Whether that makes you uncomfortable or not. Whether that turns what you were taught on it’s head.
Online bullying isn’t just happening between middle-schoolers. We’re doing it too.
Let’s stop.
~AK
BONUS CONTENT: (aka the stuff I wrote that didn’t wind up fitting in above, but is pertinent context some might find useful)
💸 The Real Cost of Living
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American household earned $101,805 before taxes in 2023, with an average expenditure of $77,280 for the year. Bureau of Labor Statistics+2Bankrate+2WalletHub+2
However, the median household income—a more accurate reflection of the typical American's earnings—was $80,610 in 2023. Census.gov
Breaking down the average monthly expenses:
Housing: $2,120 (32.9%)
Transportation: $1,098 (17%)
Food: $832 (12.9%)
Health Care: $513 (8%)
Entertainment: $303 (4.7%)Ramsey Solutions (pfft, I wish)
🧠 Why the homeownership rate appears higher now than in the 1950s—despite it being harder than ever:
📊 The Stat:
Yes, the homeownership rate was ~55% in 1950 and is ~66% now. That’s an 11 percentage point increase.
But that doesn't mean it's easier now or more widely accessible.
🧨 Here’s the catch: the “increase” hides a mountain of inequality.
In the 1950s, homeownership surged—but largely only for white families, thanks to redlining, racial covenants, and government programs like the GI Bill that disproportionately excluded Black veterans and other people of color.
Today, many of those mid-century white homeowner [coughBOOMERcough] families have passed their homes down to their kids or grandkids, keeping homeownership rates artificially high through intergenerational transfer—not affordability or accessibility.
Meanwhile, younger generations, people of color, and low-income workers are being priced out. So while the average homeownership rate is ~66%, that number hides who owns homes—and how they got them.
🏚️ Real numbers behind the struggle today:
Home prices have gone up 121% since 1960, adjusted for inflation.
→ But incomes? They've only risen ~29% in that same time.
([Census, St. Louis Fed])Today’s median home costs $420,000. In 1950? Around $7,354 (~$90k today, adjusted for inflation).
That’s a nearly 5x increase in the inflation-adjusted price.1 in 3 millennials say they’ll never be able to afford a home.
That’s more than 23 million adults just in that generation alone.Black homeownership today (44%) is lower than it was in 1968 (48%)—the year the Fair Housing Act passed.
([Urban Institute])
🧾 In short?
Yes, more people technically “own” homes now than in 1950—but the ones who do are older, richer, and more likely to have inherited wealth. For everyone else, the dream of homeownership is increasingly out of reach.
And, yes, I was surprised to find out homeownership had gone up, cuz it feels like it hasn’t. And, yes, I’ll also be digging into those stats soon to determine how single home owners versus slumlords play a role.
Oh I really needed to read this ! I get told all of these things all the time .