I am considerably more present in cyberspace than most people, maybe not young people, but certainly more than most people my age, you know, the aged, born in the middle of the last century, in the previous millennium. A long time ago. I am certainly more resident in virtual worlds than most people on the planet. However, I remember that everything that happens on my computer screen or phone is an illusion. The RW (real world) is physical and tactile. There is no world and there is no me that is not mediated by the physical world. Yes, sights and sounds are coming to me through the electronic media, but that does not make it real, any more real than, say, Hogwarts. Or Iron Man, Middle Earth, the Battlestar Galactica, or Oedipus. Real stuff can be touched, smelled, and tasted. Locker rooms stink. Old books have a wonderful musty smell. I can feel the warmth of the person I hug. I feel the weight of the dog in my lap. Nettles sting.
When I saw this girl - yes, I know she is old enough to be a mother so I should call her a woman, but anybody more than forty years younger than me is a girl, - okay, when I saw this woman on the beach in California, my heart went out to her. I automatically assumed two things were true of her. First, I couldn't imagine being in this state without being lonely. She is probably communicating with someone important to her, but, I'm sorry, if your connection to the other person is an invisible stream of electrons happening God knows where, you are not connected to that other person, not any more connected to a writer of a magazine article you are reading. And, two, how can a person standing on a beach millions of years old, before an ocean hundreds of millions of years old and breathing the same air dinosaurs breathed be completely immersed in a tiny flickering electronic screen provided by Verizon or T-mobile, corporations as indifferent to her well being and fate as Donal Trump is? She's like the people I saw at the Louvre standing before the greatest art created in this corner of the galaxy and snapping selfies of themselves instead of experiencing the art before them.
I know, I'm just another damned boomer being scornful of the next generation. Well, so it goes then. The sand under her feet, the chill on her cheek, the sound of the surf. That's what's real in this girl's life. As long as she can see only an area smaller than a playing card two inches from her nose, she's missing life. I am reminded of a quote from Isaac Newton: "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."