I want to tell you about a word, and about an essay, and about a man who wrote it in 01836 after losing his first wife, leaving the ministry, and sailing to Europe to figure out what he actually believed. His name was Ralph Waldo Emerson. The essay was called Nature. Bringing Emerson into a conversation about TikTok and analog bags risks a kind of pretension I’m aware of and am asking you to tolerate.
The essay is not what you’d expect.
Emerson’s central argument is deceptively simple: nature is not scenery. It’s a system of symbols that speaks to something in us if we’re willing to stop moving long enough to listen —a very Ferris Bueller outlook. He saw the natural world as a direct expression of something true, unmediated by institutions, traditions, or secondhand authority. To stand in a field and actually see it, he argued, was to encounter something that no church, no philosophy, and no political movement needed to broker.
The essay’s most striking passage describes what he called becoming a “transparent eyeball.” Upon first glance, it sounds mystical, and it is, but it’s also something most of us have felt in small doses. That moment on a trail, or in a park, or even just outside at the right hour, when you stop composing your thoughts and the environment stops being a backdrop. You hear it. You’re in it rather than passing through it. You are, for a moment, not performing anything for anyone, including yourself.
Emerson meant this literally. And he meant it as a corrective. Not to industry specifically, though he was watching industrialization reshape Massachusetts in real time. More broadly, to what happens to a mind that spends all its time inside human-made systems, processing human-made information, reflecting human-made anxieties on itself in an endless loop?
He called it losing the ability to read nature as a language. We might call it something else. The feeling is the same.
This is where the analog bag fails its owner most completely, and it’s got nothing to do with the iPad in the interior pocket. You can’t become a transparent eyeball while curating the experience of becoming one. Presence recorded is presence interrupted. The journal that gets photographed before it gets written in isn’t a journal yet. The yarn in the haul video isn’t craft yet. The moment you decide the experience is content, you’ve already left it.
The Romantics understood this, even if they couldn’t always live up to it. Wordsworth walked to Tintern Abbey. He didn’t document the walk and post it. The experience came first, the poem came after, and the poem was the residue of presence rather than a substitute for it.
So this is the part where I tell you what I’m actually doing, as opposed to what looks good in a haul video.
At the start of this year, I chose a word to guide me. The practice has become popular enough to be suspicious, which I acknowledge, and I’m doing it anyway. The word is Nature. Not because I had some revelatory moment in the wilderness — I live in northern Illinois, and the wilderness is not immediately on offer — but because I read Emerson’s essay for the second time and recognized the feeling he was describing. The estrangement. The closed loop of screen-to-screen input and output, with nothing genuinely new getting in.
What followed were four commitments, which I’ll describe as honestly as I can, meaning I’ll include the parts that don’t make for a good haul video.
The Four Commitments
Writing outdoors. I’ve spent years writing at desks, under artificial light, inside. This year I’ve been taking the notebook outside. Not to a coffee shop, not somewhere photogenic, just outside. The working theory, borrowed from Emerson, is that writing inside the language of nature changes what you’re able to say in it. The honest report is that it works, inconsistently, in ways I can’t fully account for. Something about the lack of a controlled environment keeps the writing from getting too tidy.
Reducing the noise. I switched to a minimal phone launcher, which puts friction between me and the applications designed to eat my attention. I leave the phone face down for stretches. I don’t do this perfectly, and I’m not trying to perform the attempt — it’s just a practical acknowledgment that the infinite scroll is genuinely engineered to be hard to stop, and engineers deserve a little counter-engineering. Emerson didn’t have a smartphone, but his insistence that nature requires full, undivided presence reads, two centuries later, like a remarkably specific diagnosis.
Photography and sketching. Not as documentation. As a way of slowing down enough to actually look at something. There’s a meaningful difference between taking a photo and making one — the latter requires you to decide what you’re seeing before you capture it. I have a Pixel with a macro lens that I’ve been genuinely impressed by. I’ve also been sketching, badly, which turns out to be better practice than photographing because you can’t cheat. The drawing doesn’t fill itself in.
Stillness. This one is the hardest to write about without sounding either mystical or like a wellness influencer, two modes I’d like to avoid equally. I’ve meditated before with mixed results. What works for me, when it works, is sitting outside and focusing on sound rather than breath — partly because my mind’s eye is genuinely stunted, partly because tinnitus makes silence its own kind of noise, and outside that’s easier to work around. It usually takes about five or ten minutes before something shifts. The inner voice fades. I stop being the narrator of my experience, and I’m just in it. Emerson’s transparent eyeball. It doesn’t last, and it doesn’t happen every time.
But when it does, it’s the furthest thing from a haul video.
I want to be clear about something before I close this out. None of what I’ve described above is a solution. I’m not offering a program. The four things I listed are just four things I’m doing, imperfectly, with no particular confidence that they’re the right four things. What they have in common is that they’re attempts at presence rather than performances of it, and the difference between those two is the whole ballgame.
The analog bag crowd isn’t wrong to feel the pull toward something slower, something more tactile, something that doesn’t notify them every four minutes. That pull is real, and it’s responding to something real. The problem is that the response gets immediately routed through the same channels as everything else: the algorithm, the haul video, and the Etsy link. The feeling of wanting out gets packaged and sold as content about wanting out, and somewhere in that process, the actual wanting out gets lost.
Emerson’s corrective was simple to articulate and genuinely difficult to do. Stop mediating. Stop processing your experience through available frameworks and just have it. Go outside. Look at something until you actually see it. Sit somewhere until the internal narrator runs out of material. It’s not complicated advice. It’s advice that can’t be filmed, monetized, or shared, and that produces nothing anyone else can consume. Which is probably why it hasn’t gone viral.
I chose the word Nature for this year because I needed a compass heading, something to return to when the noise gets loud. I’m not always returning to it. Some days the loop closes again, and I’m back inside it before I notice. But I think the noticing matters, and I think the returning matters, even when it’s imperfect and inconsistent and happening on a phone with a very good camera.
The Romantics lost. They were right about most of what they saw coming, and they lost anyway, and the world they feared arrived more or less on schedule. I don’t think that means the attempt was worthless. Wordsworth wrote the poem. Blake made the work. Emerson walked into the field and became, for a moment, just a pair of eyes in it.
It didn’t stop the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t supposed to. It was just a moment of being genuinely present in a world that was rapidly making presence optional.
We’re back there again. The question’s the same one it always was, underneath all the noise and the haul videos and the Substacks.
Can you stand somewhere long enough to actually be there?
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