We already live in an augmented reality

I was out the other day for my regular evening constitutional when I saw a local kid biking across a parking lot. He was kind of fat, he had a mullet, he was wearing an oversized bright orange T-shirt, and he was riding a BMX bike, which is to say he looked a good bit like a lot of the kids I grew up around in the mid-90s. Only one thing was different: He was wearing a pair of AirPods in his ears, those wireless Apple earphones. Presumably he was listening to music, probably something unlistenable and awful, some starlet who made the improbable jump from grinning YouTube stardom to low-level contract deal. That’s just the way it is.

That sort of sight, though—someone out in the world but plugged into a digital network in some way—is extraordinarily common these days. Even little redneck kids, for whom the luxuries of consumer technology were until recently out of reach, are plugged in. Everyone wears AirPods, or earphones, or headphones while they’re out; if they’re not doing that, they’re looking at their phone, endlessly scrolling, nonstop, relentless, everywhere they go. Take a look the next time you’re in a public place and see how many people are either listening to something you can’t hear or looking at a screen you can’t see. It’s a lot. It’s everywhere.

It kind of makes the whole burgeoning concept of “augmented reality” feel a bit silly—this whole push for people to start wearing glasses and headsets that add a digital layer over everything and let you interact with the network wherever you go. Even that phrase itself, “augmented reality,” feels kind of dumb and clunky, like something a 70-year-old tech executive came up with because he thought it sounded cool. But the idea itself feels even more outmoded and passé, because honestly we’re basically already there. People are just jacked in all the time. Fewer and fewer people are really interested in normal reality anymore. When people go out they want to bring with them these digital mineshafts into which they can fall whenever they have a free moment: If they stop at a red light, if they’re in line at the grocery store, if they’re walking in a park, if they’re waiting for their coffee, everywhere they go if they get a second they want to escape from the real world and look at a screen or listen to something coming from a little plastic pod in their ear.

It’s a terrible thing. There’s a tremendous loss here. There are so many beautiful and interesting things in the world to see, to hear, to think about. Nobody really seems to want to do that anymore. They want other things to think for them so they won’t have to. I don’t understand that. My walks usually take me by a manmade waterfall and a low-running stream. The sound of all that water is very pretty and pleasant. I don’t mean this in a Zen way, like any of this makes me feel connected with nature in some sort of incomprehensible Buddhist fashion. I mean it’s just nice stuff to listen to: the tonal subtleties of water pouring over rock, the variant resonances of flow depending on the time of day and the rainfall over the last few hours, the sound of a water system filled with life. You can look at stuff too: The eddies of water, the plants and how they grow and form a sort of miniature valley around the stream itself, the birds balancing on ends of delicate branches. All of this is good stuff, uncomplicated, satisfying, a nice thing to hear that will make you think about interesting things while grounding you in a specific, pleasant place.

The same is true of anywhere you go: A coffee shop, a gas station, a public park, a grocery store, wherever. There’s all good stuff at these places for you to see and to hear, stuff that will keep your brain moving and engaged in a healthy and pleasant way while also firmly rooting you in your home, your own place in which you choose to live. This is a good thing. It’s healthy for you to be rooted and engaged and happy in the place you live rather than always dependent upon imported digital thought wherever you go. This is how it used to be for everyone and it was quite good. You can still do this and it will still be quite good. Or you could, I don’t know, look at the Internet again on your smartphone. Or listen to some pop song you’ve heard 4,000 times before.

Those corny “augmented reality” glasses might never catch on. They’re just too clunky and they make everyone look like a nerd. But they don’t need to catch on, not really. People have already voluntarily acquiesced to the whole thing. Normal life is just not cutting it for a lot of people anymore. Maybe it never was and all of this stuff is just bridging a gap that already existed. But I don’t think so. I think we’d all be happier if we weren’t constantly looking at stupid little screens and listening to music from headphones all day. I think you’ll be happier, at least. Give it a shot and see.