Kristen: 0:02

Welcome to season two of Talk with Kristen with an E. This season, we're digging a little deeper into leadership, personal growth, and the courage it takes to follow your passion. Real conversations, honest reflections, because life isn't perfect and neither are we. Hey everybody. Welcome back. So excited for today's episode because we have back one of my favorite guests. Guess who's here? It's Katie. Hi Katie. Hello, Kristen. It is so good to be back. How are you? I am doing great and I am thrilled that you're here again. We had so much fun last time and I know the topic today is going to be probably just as good. I can't wait. So today we're talking about, touching grass and boredom, which doesn't sound fun when you talk about like boredom or just touching grass. But I think we're gonna get into a lot more of what that actually means. So let's start with the boredom part. So Katie, do you remember the last time you were truly bored?

Caity: 1:19

I don't remember the last time I was truly bored. I don't know if this is a sign of just getting older or maybe that I'm overcommitting myself or not carving out time to be bored, but, I am constantly stressed out,

Kristen: 1:36

and I think it depends who has time. Yeah. Who has time to just sit and be bored? When I think of bored, I remember being a child at home and being like, mom, I am bored. And my mom would be like, if you're bored, I'll give you something to do. Like you can go clean this, do this, so you never actually wanted to say you were bored because then you were like, can I get something terrible to do? But I've thought about it. Like as an adult. And I started looking at people too when I'm out. Even just standing in line at a grocery store or sitting at a restaurant you look around, there are so many people on their phones that nobody is willing to just sit there so when you think about though, like. Maybe. Maybe we have to define boredom first because I think sometimes we just avoid boredom to be busy and we'll scroll or pull out our phones and we're not giving ourselves time to have that kind of quiet time or space to think, if you're like me, you don't want to hear your own thoughts because then it builds up anxiety and irrational fears and things you'd rather not think about. Thoughts on that?

Caity: 2:48

I feel like you just saw inside of my soul. Let me, explain a little bit so much truth to what you just outlined. I'll go back to your very first question, which was when was the last time I was bored? I think I've not allowed myself to be bored because of my phone. It's always in my hand. It's on my nightstand while I sleep, when I wake up, I look at my phone.

Kristen: 3:14

Mm-hmm.

Caity: 3:15

I'm already checking work emails before I have registered what time it was or. Even sat up or rubbed my eyes, you know?

Kristen: 3:23

Like I still have to pee super bad, and there I am laying in my bed seeing what's new on Facebook.

Caity: 3:29

Bringing it into the bathroom. That was just somewhat recent, like epiphany or realization of like, oh, this is a problem. This is no bueno. This is real bad.

Kristen: 3:41

Would you say your phone is more a security blanket or an emotional support animal and why?

Caity: 3:50

I think I want to think of it as a support thing, but it is probably the genesis of my anxiety. If I'm being honest, it's probably the source of a lot of my anxiety, but there's this addiction aspect to it, news is moving at an unprecedented rate. Every day. It's like, how can we outdo ourselves from yesterday and there's some level of addiction and breaking news, and now we have news apps and push notifications my phone is also my work device working on the phone. I've got work emails on my phone. It's, it's my everything app. I think the phone is room so much, including the art of debate. Maybe that can be a whole other conversation.

Kristen: 4:45

So, oh, now I forgot my question. It was gonna be a good one too. Okay. So no, I wanna stick on something else that you just said though about your phone being the cause of your anxiety. So I see your point. I understand that. But do you also have anxiety if your phone isn't with you?

Caity: 5:06

I think I do before I put it down, but once I put it down, I don't miss it. I don't think about it. This is not a new thing for me. Since I've got a phone in, what was that

Kristen: 5:18

That's when I got mine, my freshman year.

Caity: 5:21

Yeah.

Kristen: 5:22

It wasn't a smartphone, right? No, it was a Nokia that I was able to change the cover on. I put my Strawberry shortcake, or my Care Bear's cover. Oh yeah. I had the old phone. Cricket was my provider, and I only had voice calls because voicemail and text messaging were all extra. And since I was paying my own cell phone bill, I didn't add any of the extras. I didn't have caller id. It was literally just four phone calls. Oh, yes, yes. Which is, which is so crazy now because have you seen the meme that's like as a millennial, send me a text, send me an email, send me like all these things, and it's like, send me carrier pigeons, send me smoke signals, and all the way at the bottom it's like, call me. Like, don't ever call me.

Caity: 6:04

Or heaven forbid, you know, if you do call me, do not leave me a voicemail because I'm not.

Kristen: 6:08

Yeah. Because then I'm gonna get anxiety. The voicemails are all gonna add up, and I'm gonna see that I have six voicemails and I'm not gonna wanna listen to any of them. It was such a great thing when iPhone added that. You can see the text for what the voicemail says, because voicemails give me anxiety too. I don't wanna deal with it. I'm an avoider in so many ways. The reason I asked if being without your phone gave you anxiety is because I feel like I do now, not during the day. I work in a job where I can't have my phone with me. It, you stay in my car, go into a lockbox, so I'm without my phone a lot, but when I'm at home and if I don't have my phone, I feel a little bit. Where's my phone? Where did I put it? What if somebody needs me? And I worry about that. It's crazy because when we were younger, we didn't have phones with us all the time. If something happened, you wouldn't find out about it till you got home. And if there was a message on the answering machine but I am so worried now, even if I'm at a movie and have my phone on silent, I'm like, oh my gosh. What if someone needs me? What if someone dies? What if somebody has to call me and I can't answer my phone? Like I said, I am full of anxieties and irrational fears on so many levels,

Caity: 7:13

and you know what? I hear you and see you on that, but you, had a list of alternatives or, ways of, contacting each other. Yeah. And you mentioned carrier pigeons and we laugh and joke but that was a real thing. There was a day where you didn't hear until, some dude on a horse ran. Yeah. The Pony Express to another.

Kristen: 7:36

Yes.

Caity: 7:36

You're right. Yeah, they were okay. I mean they might have had typhoid fever or something. But you know, socially they were maybe less anxious than we are now.

Kristen: 7:47

You're right. There was that age where nothing happened and now we're in this over influenced, over informed and that probably is causing a lot of our anxiety.

Caity: 8:01

And I think a lot of it, you used the word over and form and I think that's really important because there's this point of diminishing return. A lot of it has to do with information that affects us in a real tangible way.'cause you know, a lot of things, we like, I mean these ear bunny ear quotes like affects us. But if we didn't know about it, we wouldn't know it's affecting us. Right. Like going back to the point of diminishing return. If we consume and seek information and news that directly affect our community, ourselves, our neighbors. And we have some control. We can, bring a casserole or watch their kids while they have to go to a doctor's appointment or something like that. We feel more in control and it brings our anxiety down. But when we surpass that point of what we can and cannot affect any control or impact over. All of that excess is, what brings so much of the anxiety because it feels important. But it is, nearly impossible as an individual or even, a small collection of people to actually do something about it where it's affecting someone somewhere else, which is important. And I think that we all need to be aware. Especially of injustices and, things happening around the world, outside of our immediate communities. But I think the amount of space that has taken has compressed and made smaller. The space that we have for what we can control.

Kristen: 9:41

Hundred percent. It's the control. There's all these things going on that we have no control over and it's, you know, that I think does create some of the anxiety and then the uncomfortable feeling because there's nothing we can do about it. Like there's things we can do about it, but not on that grand macro scale. Like you said, we can do more on the micro level of within what's within our scope or within our realm of where we can affect change and control, what we can control.

Caity: 10:12

In the beginning of our conversation, you asked about boredom and I didn't have a very good answer, but now that we're talking I remember very. Fondly honestly, being a kid we would drive from central Florida, pack into a little white caravan and drive up to northwestern buffalo, like. Western New York. Upstate

Kristen: 10:37

New York as we

Caity: 10:37

Well if you call it upstate, then like the Albany people get angry. Oh, okay. It's like this weird, you know, kind of thing. It was a very long car ride and the only thing that we had to entertain us was, maybe like two or three cassette tapes of the Beatles. We would play it until it ended and then we would take the tape out, flip it over, put it back in and play the other side of it. And we would sit there and sing The Beatles for, you know, how many days it took us to drive from Florida to New York. At some point everyone gets sick of the Beatles and you turn it off for a little while. You're a kid buckled into a seat, you cannot move, and it's silent and you're just staring out the window and you're either talking or poking, the sibling next to you. Or you're looking out the window. And in an interesting way, that was my first glimpse at the world. Mm-hmm. Because we, you know, big family, we didn't travel a lot for the sake of traveling and exploring new places. Both of, my parents were from New York. We were living in Florida, so a lot of our free time for travel was. Just a straight shot, not really stopping to see the sites, it allowed so many hours, patient hours, uninterrupted hours to just think about what I'm seeing. If it's dark out, you know, then you're really inside of your head and those were such precious hours. For me.

Kristen: 12:15

It's funny how alike we are because we'd have to compare the mileage. Your trip was probably still longer, but my story is almost exactly the same. We were living in southwestern Pennsylvania, but both of my parents were from the Boston area. So every summer vacation. We would go up to New England I had family in Massachusetts. I had family in New Hampshire. We had family in Maine, so we would do the whole thing. And, it was the same thing. We had, we had more than one or, or two tapes.'cause my dad had this whole like, well, you know, we had CD books when we were older, like, had our own cars. My dad had a tape book with all these different tapes. So we would get to pick tapes and listen to the music. Sometimes we would play games like, I'm going on a trip and I'm bringing an apple. I'm going on a trip and I'm bringing an apple and a banana, and you'd go through the whole alphabet and just around through everybody. That was my favorite game. I also believe it really helped all my memory skills and learning, but you're right. There would be sometimes where you'd have to be quiet and I would just stare out the window, and you're right. Seeing the sights nighttime was the best'cause you could see the stars and the moon and it was like, you could pretend you were anywhere. I would daydream and imagine things. Write stories in my head. I would read too until I get sick because I didn't, I wasn't really good reading while in the car, but you are right. And I never thought of that as boredom really.'cause I think boredom has so many connotations, but that was more just open time. I think that's what we don't do now as adults is we don't allow ourselves that time. And part of it, is because. Society, you know, it's this go, go, go grind, you've gotta do the things and be the things I think we feel like we always have to be doing something because I know there's times where if I wanna just sit, first of all, just sitting feels weird. I will usually still put the TV on or music but if I do just sit, I'm like, okay, but I should be doing something like this. Doesn't feel right to just be sitting here like, I'm wasting time. I'm not getting things done. But that's part of the relaxing and resetting and dealing with our anxiety to just sit. What do you think about just sitting though,

Caity: 14:30

oh my gosh, you know what that makes me think about? Wow. For me, it makes me think about how focused we are going back to the society, especially the us, how focused we are on productivity. Also how we measure and value certain kinds of productivity and output. And I think in a lot of ways it's set up to reward a certain kind of output because there's not a clear standard currency to creative output. Creative output the same that we do a more kinda standard economic, you know, crunch some numbers, something comes out the other end of the machine kind of kind of output. I think it's important and if you ask most innovators and entrepreneurs, they will likely have a story that goes back to an origin of. I was sitting, thinking, talking with someone. I had experienced this thing and then, you know, I made this connection between this other thing, and that's where the idea sparked the idea was sparked in some space where they had time to think. Mm-hmm. As opposed to being stressed, carrying their phone around hitting refresh every three seconds.

Kristen: 15:55

because how many stories start with sitting in a bar drawing on the back of a napkin, a plan for this product, company, whatever. It's when you're having that face-to-face engagement and you're not doing anything else but just engaging with the person. If you take that back to just being with yourself and engaging with yourself. Couldn't the same thing be said almost like having a conversation with yourself oh, what do I think about this? Oh, that's an interesting point. You know, I wonder if that's something that's lost on us too, because we're so focused on filling our time with activities, with sound, with stuff on our phone, with information. What if we just sat with ourselves and our thoughts?

Caity: 16:42

Yeah. I was married for a while. We were together for over a decade, married for just over eight, and we, we ended up starting the divorce paper, like submitting our papers, I think two days before lockdown. Oh wow. Before then there's a period, where, you're not sure what life is going to be like by yourself.

Kristen: 17:05

And on

Caity: 17:05

your own, you know, there's always someone there to help fill the space, the physical space, or fill the conversation space. You're kind of doing life together. I remember my girlfriends were all like, it's gonna be fine. We'll be your wing woman. We're gonna take you out. You won't be alone. You won't be bored. And of course, no one could predict, but the world had very different plans and suddenly I was very alone. And all my girlfriends were, isolating in pods where some of them were pregnant and had little kids and, their parents and, extended family were moving in and, they were isolating in very real ways. After becoming newly single again, it was kind of a moment of truth. I didn't know if I liked myself. I didn't really know who I was, yet, and suddenly have a lot of alone time, a lot of quiet time. I would put my phone down. I picked up trail running, which is something I had never, ever, ever even been interested in doing before. And I would go out for increasingly longer and longer jobs and hikes with no phone, nothing. Sometimes I wouldn't even bring a water bottle honestly, I think being out in nature. Untethered to electronics is the final frontier. Space is crowded, you know? Everything is crowded and noisy and messy, but just being out on a trail at dawn is just magical. You rediscover all five senses in a way that you kind of lose when you have a phone on you.

Kristen: 18:40

So that goes back to your point about touching grass. Was that kind of your moment to just get outside and touch grass? And how did that, you talked about in the moment what it did for you, but what lasting impacts has that had by you being outside and kind of one with nature to find yourself?

Caity: 18:59

You know what I'm just realizing is I started doing that because I was bored. We've come full circle. I'm so serious. Yeah. Like it was, I had nothing else to do. You know, for Gump when he decides to just my life, but you know what? It didn't start off running. I thought I would go for a hike by myself and girl. I packed a backpack and enough stuff like I've never drank two liters of water before. I packed two liters. Yeah. Just in case even four miles walk in the woods. Yeah. Like I had, you know, probably 5,000 calories worth of food on me. And just in case, you know, first aid kit. Yeah. Like, I just, I didn't know, and it was scary. I was packing my fears, you know? Then I was doing the same hike, more frequently it was every morning and I was like, oh, like I think I can get through this faster. So it doesn't take as long. So I started kind of jogging and I was like, like, it's hard to jog with a heavy backpack, it progressed and my pack started getting lighter and I was going faster or a little further. And then over the next couple years I started doing trail half marathons and entering races and competing it really kind of blossomed into this thing that never, would've crossed my mind, but opened up new communities and friendships. I never, ever would have discovered or had the time and attention span to foster, had I been glued to my phone sitting at home. The pain of same became greater than the pain of change in those early times of COVID. I was like, f this phone thing. I can't just sit here. This is boring and I'm bored.

Kristen: 20:45

Mm-hmm.

Caity: 20:45

that's one example of what came of that boredom.

Kristen: 20:48

I've never thought about that before. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, cool. But I do think that's a great story and how the boredom led to that. And I think there is benefits for other people to put down the phone and get out too. I don't know if you've seen, there was, this meme I've seen on Facebook or Instagram and it's like, we're too old for all this mean girl crap. Just go out and touch grass. It's kind of a trite thing to say, but I do. Wonder if all these people who get all up in their feelings, and I mean the negative fighting, contentious, mean girl kind of stuff, if they would put their phone down get out of that mindset and go outside and touch grass. Hug a tree, smile at the sun. Like any of those things, I feel like really could change their mindset or at least break the mental pattern they're in now. Not that you were a mean girl, but it did break up your boredom. Do you think there's benefits for people putting down the phone to get out of those toxic mindsets? What do you think?

Caity: 21:58

I would certainly hope so. I would say it's a lot harder to ignore reality when you are in it. When you are living in the reality, it's hard to not be in that reality. Let me rephrase this, turn it around. When you're on your phone. You start to create, and I think this is, studied, these, echo chambers are created in, in your online environment and you suddenly stop becoming challenged about things that you believe, when you are out in the world, out in reality, ideally, hopefully, we are all constantly challenged. Our beliefs based on who we are meeting and the things that we're witnessing in the world how we're feeling and, our lived experience. I've never really understood the high praise for, people who never change. if we're doing. Life. Right? And if we are living and experiencing it together, like the world is changing. So if we are trying to remain unchanged, I think we're doing not only ourselves and injustice, but I think doing the world a bit of an injustice as well.

Kristen: 23:13

Well, yes to all of that. And let me see if I can add on a little bit too. To your last point, first about the changing, like yeah, we were never meant to be stagnant. Like we should always be learning and growing and doing. You know, I've talked a couple times on the podcast too about. Learning from your mistakes and failure and fail early. Fail off and learn. Find out what doesn't work. Try something else, read a book, learn something, and we should always be change. Change isn't necessarily good or bad, it's just morphing and becoming a better version of yourself. To your point about echo chambers, it's not even just that people create a false sense of reality because when they're in those echo chambers, they believe that everybody thinks the way they do. When they're out in the real world, it's, earth shattering to them that how could anybody not think what I think, I thought everybody thought the way I do, and that's on. All sides of the spectrum. Everybody who puts themselves surrounded by people who think just like them can get into that mindset. And where we're missing, is the piece of what the past is where people would actually get together. And you mentioned earlier about debate, yes, there was debate, but there was also good conversation. Like you picture the two old men on the front porch in their rocking chairs with their sweet tea, talking about whatever's going on. You really wanna go back to business piece? I do. I'm, it's, it's, I, I, there was a past lifetime where I was there and something is pulling me back a hundred percent. I will have to show you the pictures. I had a fifties book club party a few years ago, and I totally looked the part i'm all in. Please share pictures, I'll for sure. It's this false sense of reality. People were able to have opinions and share them and learn. You can have different opinions about anything. Some people like Backstreet Boys, some people like NSYNC I use that as a simple example, but you could sit and have a conversation with somebody like, oh, well, who's your favorite singer on the Backstreet Boys? Oh, well I think that Justin is better than Brian Latrell. You can have that conversation and you're not just gonna say, oh, you like Backstreet Boys, you're dumb. They're dumb. Everybody's dumb. Like instinct's. The only right one, you would never do that. Like you would have a conversation with them. And that's something that's lost because we, we. Not we, you and I are all about this, but there are people who are not willing to engage in those conversations and see another viewpoint and then just get so stuck themselves. Okay, I'm done rambling. What else were you gonna say? Well,

Caity: 25:49

I was gonna say why I really believe that the smartphone has ruined the art of date. Is because no longer do we have to use our skills of influence and our words and pull from our own deep wells of knowledge and understanding to make a point and persuade. But we like, that's a very ling of what could become a beautiful debate. Someone whips stop their phone, they're like, oh, let's just Google the answer. So we don't have to pull on our own internal databases and learn from each other. Also practice leadership skills. And being part of the conversation, being comfortable with conflict. Mm-hmm. And you know, not being in agreement. I think that's really, really important as well. So maybe that's a challenge. Maybe do we challenge ourselves for like the next week or something to not just Google the answer right away?

Kristen: 26:56

Yeah, that's totally good. But you bring up a good point, because. What's the saying? Like smartphones are actually making dumb people because it's almost like there's so much information. You're right. You don't have to like, you know, if you were doing, again, like the old people and their newspaper with the crossword puzzle and there's like. What's an eight letter word for whatever, you know, you could just Google it now and Google will give you like 6,000 different words that could work for it, or the right answer. I, I don't know. But yeah, it's, it's using your brain again, the way it was intended to be, which then would add into that growing and learning and I don't know.

Caity: 27:41

Do we need to explain the phrase touch grass?

Kristen: 27:44

Yes. Because in my mind, I literally just see myself walking out my front porch and kneeling in my front yard and be like. Oh, that's grass. So yes, please explain it.

Caity: 28:00

Okay, so, I have, a few dear friends who work with the youth and they get to pick up all the latest language and lingo if I'm lucky, they will pass this new knowledge and information off to me and our friends. There's been quite a surge of new words, and I don't, I'm not staying such fast as a new one because for all I know, it could be three years old and I'm just now learning about it. But I really clung onto this one and I have kind of adopted it into my own vernacular. Touch grass. Yeah, as I understand it, it's just, when you've been on your phone or stepped into, digital media for too long, you gotta just put it down and go touch grass, get outside.

Kristen: 28:51

I love that. And it's funny because I do think I saw that I also am one who tries to keep up with the language of the youth because my son's 12, and so like the middle school junior high slang is really big, like six, seven. I was like, oh, 6, 7, 6, 7, it means something. Seven. Who, what does it mean? Who knows? Before we start our Google Challenge, Google it because it'll make more sense than me trying to explain it.

Caity: 29:21

Wait, if you, okay, one more, maybe two more questions on this. Six, seven is six. Is it six seven together as one thing or is six? One thing and then seven is something,

Kristen: 29:33

so it's six, seven. But their hands go up and down, almost like scales, like 6, 7, 6, 7.

Caity: 29:41

These hands go up and down.

Kristen: 29:43

Like I said, just Google this one. We're

Caity: 29:45

too old for this. We are too. I know

Kristen: 29:46

I try to use, we get a free, I dunno.

Caity: 29:49

We challenge ourselves to a week

Kristen: 29:52

minutes. It doesn't start till we're done recording. We can use Google in the present moment. So I just looked up touch grass and how to use it online. And it says, touch grass is usually an insult. Used to imply that someone spends too much time on the internet and they should go outside into nature to reconnect with reality. It's an insult.

Caity: 30:14

I've been using it. I hope I've not been

Kristen: 30:16

insulting

Caity: 30:17

people.

Kristen: 30:18

The phrase touch grass means to log off the internet and reconnect with reality. It's often used as a comeback. It's online arguments and applies that the other person is disconnected from reality because of how much time they spent. It reminds me of like, okay, boomer,

Caity: 30:34

It was an insult.

Kristen: 30:36

I'm trying to make you feel better that you have not been insulting all these people.

Caity: 30:40

If there's a bright side in any of this, then maybe it is simply that the youth, young people. Young people work

Kristen: 30:48

now. Yeah, I know.

Caity: 30:50

What,

Kristen: 30:50

what do you call these whipper snapper.

Caity: 30:56

Maybe it's a sign of corrective progress on the digital front. Yes. That they are starting to take notice and call out their peers.

Kristen: 31:06

Yes.

Caity: 31:07

Now,

Kristen: 31:09

no, I think there's definitely a possibility with that, because I think. I had a statistic here somewhere about the different generations with their screen time, but I can't find it right now. I think there will be a switch. I'm just speculating, but to your point, I see some in the youth and the young people, there are some more connections. I mean, they have phones and they're on them, but I don't know that it's the same way that older people do. I believe that we've seen different groups of people, kind of the pendulum go one way or the other. And I do wonder if, because earlier I'd said that we've kind of hit this bubble of social media maybe we are going to swing the other way where people do embrace more real relationships and reality. I don't know, maybe that's just my hopeful wishful thinking.

Caity: 32:05

That's a beautiful, I. I hope and wish that too in a way, you know? Hmm. There are two, what's the word? What is it called? Well, not a utopia dystopia. Oh, yeah. Okay. I've got like two dystopian, kind of like fantasies, I guess. Mm-hmm. When I was just daydreaming and I'm like, Hmm. What catastrophe could actually end up having a positive impact on the world one of them is what if selectively and successfully and without other harm, every communication satellite was just taken out. Yeah. I'm not wishing this or suggesting this, I'm just saying what would happen, suddenly our phones would not work. Yeah. A lot of other things would go offline too. And you know, a lot of, medical things. Let's just pretend it only affects wifi or 5G. You know, for social stuff. But that could be a really interesting kind of equalizer. It would

Kristen: 33:14

be.

Caity: 33:14

I think,'cause suddenly it's not,

Kristen: 33:16

I think on a small scale, you see it sometimes if there's a long power outage. Because so much stuff is done electronically. It's your TVs, it's your phones, eventually they're gonna run out. So I think an extended power outage may do something like that too. When we've even seen it, you know, the power's out at home. Well what are we gonna do? We can't watch tv. Oh, we can't do this, so we can't do that. I think that's kinda because I do believe that. For society, to change, there would have to be something big that almost forces away the technology so that people don't have that avenue and they are forced outside to touch grass. Yeah. Or just to find other ways like playing board games again or going for a run with a friend I do think it's possible, but you know, Katie, it may not take a world tragedy. We talked about engaging in our own community and change starts with one. So maybe it just takes a few of us and our listeners being bold and stepping out and saying, Hey, I'm gonna. Go phone free for X amount of minutes, days, weeks, months, years, engage in my real life again.

Caity: 34:37

Yes. And, to be clear, I feel like I, I really, took it, took it hard right. Turn there with like the, you know, way to get there. But I think the way you describe is more of a. Sustained meaningful cultural shift. And a choice taken by people as opposed to being forced into it. As history shows, if we can collectively make better decisions about connecting and community, it's more likely to have lasting real impact.

Kristen: 35:14

Yes. That's what we need to do. We all need to just. Bond together and say goodbye to our digital world, you know? Have you seen the movie? Or read the book Ready Player One?

Caity: 35:29

No.

Kristen: 35:30

Okay. Have you seen Avatar?

Caity: 35:33

Oh, one of them.

Kristen: 35:35

I didn't see the second one either.

Caity: 35:36

Okay. I think you'll be

Kristen: 35:37

fine.

Caity: 35:38

it's nothing against movies. I'm sure they're wonderful. I just, fall asleep as soon as movies come on. It's really bad.

Kristen: 35:44

Oh, same. It happens. And the old reason I bring up Ready Player one is because, it's kind of like this virtual reality. Like there's people and in their homes they put on the headset or whatever, and they're in this virtual reality where they have another character so they can be someone else, and they're involved in this whole other world, and it's neither good nor bad. It's just how it is. Like it's in the future. It's what the world becomes. I feel like that's kind of what we're in now, is that we have our online personas and we are engaged in these digital worlds so much that we aren't fully engaged in our real world. And even at the beginning of the episode I mentioned that, we see people at restaurants sitting in the booths with their family. Everybody's on their phone, nobody's engaging with each other. And so I think that as a society, we need to try to break free of the. Chains that bind us to this digital world that feels like reality and actually, you know, take off our headsets and put down the phones and look around and see what's actually in the reality around us. So many people think reality is bad and the world is bad because of what they see in their digital worlds, and if they would just take the time to look at it with open eyes, open hearts, open minds, they would see that the real world is actually amazing and there's wonderful people around them that they could engage with and get to know and learn and grow and make a difference if they would all just get outside and touch grass.

Caity: 37:16

Yes. Touch grass.

Kristen: 37:20

Touch grass, that's all it is. Touch grass. In a really positive way, in the most wholesome way, like, just touch the grass, or if it's fall, touch the leaves. Or if it's winter, touch the snow. Like, just touch something outside without your phone

Caity: 37:39

If it's a person, just ask for permission first to do consent. Touch a dog. Dogs are great. I feel like you know your dogs are happy when they're being pet. If you can find a baby

Kristen: 37:51

Baby goats are lovely to pet. We had, yeah, there was a petting zoo recently at event I was at, I need a, I need a baby goat now.

Caity: 37:58

That's very specific. I love that.

Kristen: 38:00

Anyway, before we get too far off Katie, thank you so much for coming again. Any final thoughts you'd like to share with the listeners?

Caity: 38:08

This was so much fun. I, too many more thoughts. We'll have to save it for another time. Thank you so much for spending time with me.

Kristen: 38:17

Yes, and we will definitely do this again'cause like you said, so many more thoughts to share. All right. Till next time, bye

Caity: 38:26

bye.

Kristen: 38:28

That's a wrap for this week's episode. Thanks so much for spending time with me. Until next time, be honest with yourself. Ask the hard questions, and remember, you are not alone on this journey.