Knowledge of the world isn’t the same as experiencing the world. 
Why does online connection so often seem to lack aliveness, as compared to encounters with the world of flesh-and-blood people, nature, and material things? This paragraph from Karl Ove Knausgaard struck me as eloquent: “It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world,” he writes, “and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world.” Apart from anything else, another good reason to get outside, and soon.

oof. that hits deep.