Category: Two Hours Spring 2022

By EA

In today’s world everyone is constantly on their phones or watching tv and spreading lies and misinformation and people just never seem to just stop what they are doing and get up and go for a little adventure. It doesn’t even have to be for long. You could go to a national park or a local park, or just take your dog for a walk without being plugged to our electronic devices. You can find joy and happiness with nature and wildlife just outside your doorstep.

There I am watching the Nightly News on NBC and ABC every night getting all the headlines from the day’s events.  I watched a lot of Covid and mask policies coverage on the news mostly of course, but there was also new coverage about the upcoming Winter Olympics and the Superbowl playoff games. I watched the weather reports about the blizzards in the East coast and was kind of disappointed that we didn’t get a blizzard because I love snow and the cold, and it never really snows in Virginia anymore. It was also interesting seeing the south being hit with frigid temperatures and iguanas falling from trees because they become frozen and just fall. When the temperature warms up and they thaw out and are still alive. I find that very fascinating. After I watched the news, I switch to Disney+ to watch Encanto for the fourth time. I do all this while on my other electronic devices. I am sure it is not the healthiest way to life when being consumed by technology, social media, and the news. I then check my blackboard and email again to make sure I don’t miss any assignments or important announcements. As a socially anxious introverted person who spends my time isolated in my apartment avoiding social interaction because the pandemic has caused a decline in progress with my social anxiety, so it is like starting from scratch and it sucks. 

Since it was very cold over the weekend I stayed on campus and didn’t want to slip on icy roads driving somewhere. I just decided to explored campus for an hour being unplugged in the winter environment and checked out GMU’s different gardens and greenhouses on campus and visited the pond across from the Performing Arts Center looking for geese or squirrels or any wildlife if they weren’t hibernating. It was nice getting outside and taking in the sights since I never had time to do it my first semester in the fall as a transfer student. Last semester, I volunteered 20 hours in the hydroponic greenhouse, innovative food forest and the roof top greenhouse for volunteer hours for my class last semester. I never thought of myself as a plant person until I started volunteering for the Sustainability office. It really helped with my stress and anxiety it was very calming, fun, relaxing, and I just kept going back every moment of it. I hope to start volunteering again this spring semester soon because I had so much fun volunteering at the different greenhouses and gardens. I love nature and animals and I want to start doing more exploring because I want to do wildlife conservation of some kind someday. My walk sure was cold but so worth it in the end.

By Eric DeBerry

Virtually the entire world is online these days, all of humanity’s knowledge is accessible via the internet and social media, which is also hosted from the internet which reigns as king for interacting with friends, family, and strangers. I decided to hop on my computer and scour the internet as my source of media consumption. I start my hour by immediately opening Spotify and playing some music as background noise. This was done I realized a second later as pure muscle memory, not really a conscious thought given to it. It’s almost a ritual to instantly distract myself with music the second I have free time. I wonder how dull it must have felt back before having instant access to a backtrack to everyday life. Then again would it have really seemed dull if the distraction was not even something thought of as a possibility at their time? The world seems so small now with the ease of communication and ease of access to information and distractions at just the touch of your fingertips. I decide to open YouTube, something that has been at the forefront of my internet world since my childhood and start a video with a clip from Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I am immediately hit with the most annoying and common part of modern life: ads. An eyerolling commercial with an emu, I watch fifteen seconds of this before my video. My clip rolls by and I, like the robot I am, click on another clip in the recommendations. Another ad hits me, the same exact ad. I endure the fifteen seconds and start my video. In what feels like a few minutes, I look at the clock and a little over an hour has passed. I look at what I am currently watching, I had gone from clips of a tv show to seeing a man make a sausage using only grounded up lemons. I barely noticed the time go by… I feel like I’ve wasted so much of my day on this stupid website, but then I see a thumbnail of the same man making sausage out of twinkies. What’s another a few minutes I think to myself and click on the video.  

When it came to find a place to distance myself from the noise and distractions of Fairfax I immediately thought of home. I come from rural western Loudoun, where it took me twenty minutes to drive to high school, and traffic jams were created by tractors moving at five miles an hour rather than a million cars all trying to weave past each other. I decided that since I had the afternoon free, I might as well drive the hour or so back towards the country, so off I headed. I ended up at Raven’s Rock in western Virginia, a quick hike up the mountainside and I’m all but alone. The first thing I do is take a deep breath. There is something about the cold crisp mountain air that feels so refreshing. I find a fallen tree and use it as a seat to lounge back and survey my surroundings. It’s a bit too cold for too much of the wildlife to be active but you can hear the occasional bird in the distance and the snap of twigs as what I assume are deer move around in the distance. Its peaceful, quiet, and something I miss from before moving to Fairfax for school. The woods make the world seem to stretch and grow, seemingly less crowded and larger than the constant strip malls, townhomes, and various buildings that surround everyday life in the suburban area that neighbors D.C. and make everything seem within an arm’s reach. I sit for a while and reminisce about the camping trips and dumb high school parties I used to go to in these woods. Its then the timer on my phone goes off, and I am drawn back to the present and summoned back towards civilization. 

My experience with this little experiment reminded me of how easily it is to be distracted by the small meaningless things shoved in our faces constantly and how much time we lose by getting drawn into these things. It also reminded me of how much I miss the quiet, and the peacefulness that can come from nature and the outdoors. Being from the country I often took these things for granted and it is only when I am coming back from the constant noise and stimulation from busy Fairfax do I realize how much I really appreciate the calmness of the countryside. Time seems to slow down when not I am no longer distracted by my phone or computer, but I also know that these things have become all but essential in modern society. The quiet of the country is relaxing but this world we live in operates from behind a computer screen, and while it is nice to unplug occasionally, the future is without a doubt plugged in.

By Anonymous

For my hour in a mediated environment, I watched YouTube and used Instagram for an hour. When using social media that does not have sound associated, I put music on before going back to scrolling. On YouTube, I watched various video. I watched some hair style tutorials and videos of hairdressers doing cool looking haircuts or dye patterns. I watched some videos of someone decorating cakes. I did not gain much from most of the videos, however I did watch a few that I feel taught me a new skill or way of doing something. Besides those, I watched some other random videos and then switched to Instagram. Some of the pictures on social media were of beautiful landscapes or national parks, which I regularly look through and found a bit ironic since I was sitting on my couch with so many beautiful parks nearby. After spending an hour on my phone, I usually feel a little bit melancholy as I feel that I could have used my time in a more productive way. 

For my hour in an outdoor environment, I went to Burke Lake Park and walked on the path around the lake. It was very cold, and most of the lake was frozen. There were deer tracks on the frozen lake, and some were fairly far from the shore. I also saw two types of woodpeckers, a pileated woodpecker and a downy woodpecker. There were lots of people walking, running, or biking despite the bitter cold.  

After completing this assignment, I realized that I usually have music or a podcast playing, which is not a bad thing in itself, but I also feel that I have lost the ability to comfortably sit in silence. I definitely feel an information overload. When watching tutorials, there are often so many ways to do something that I don’t commit to one. I just watch several that are different and then can’t remember any of them. I noticed that I gravitate away from videos that are over five minutes long, and I feel that our fast-paced culture has made our attention spans much shorter. Even though it is sometimes a hassle to get outside, I am always glad and feel better after being outside.

By Anonymous

For this assignment, we were tasked to spend one hour gathering information from both technology and media, then an hour outside in nature. For the first hour I decided to spend my time scrolling through Youtube and watching completely random videos instead of just one news channel, and here is what I learned. In narwhales, the larger the tusk, the larger the testicles, and the tusk is actually a tooth that pierces through their faces. I also learned that there are lava tubes on the moon and scientists think this would be a good place to start a moon colony. Next I learned that in far sighted people, your glasses will make your eyes look bigger, while in nearsighted people your glasses will make your eyes look smaller. I also learned that if you put a strawberry in bleach, you can remove the red from the strawberry. Lastly, I learned that companies actually own certain colors like barbie with pink and post it notes with yellow.

For my next hour, I went out to my back yard and sat next to the fire watching the wildlife in my pasture. I live out in Fauquier county, so we have a good amount of wildlife present compared to Fairfax. First off in my time outside, I learned that Vasoline or any petroleum jelly is a fantastic fire starter. During my time outside, I was greeted by a small population of deer that call my pasture home. We have around 8 doe that bed in the back and at this time, some should be pregnant with twins. In this group there are around 3 yearlings, which were just fawns last year. The next thing I learned is that my horse prefers to drink out of the pond, I believe this is because his water is most likely frozen on the top layer. After watching my horse, I noticed some of my neighbors chickens in the back. I believe this is because the chickens prefer the horse manure pasture because they’re able to find more to eat. Lastly for my hour outside I saw a couple of ducks stopping by my pond for rest as they fly south. These two ducks always come back to our pond around this time and also in the spring when it warms up. The cool part is they always come back and in the spring they bring their ducklings for the peace, quiet, and a good meal from our pond.

During this assignment I learned a lot about the differing information gathered from both media and Nature. I learned that when watching Youtube, I gathered a bunch of useless information regarding a bunch of different fields and not just one topic. I will probably forget a lot of this information a week from now since it has no impact on my life. Next with my time spent in nature, I didn’t learn a bunch but I still gathered information. This information I gathered will most likely be of more use to me since It has directly impacted me and my relative environment. I do not think either of these were bad forms of information gathering, but I think a combination of the two would be the most beneficial. 

By Colin McDonald

For the hour of media, I decided to look at news websites. Starting with the New York Times I look at the headlines, the big topics being discussed include the US and Russia arguing about Ukraine at the UN, Boris Johnson being criticized for having parties during Covid lockdowns, and the Moderna Covid vaccine gaining FDA approval. I click on and read an article about people in Senegal who sort through waste looking for plastic to sell; one woman supports her family with the $25 – $30 dollars she makes a week doing this. Throughout the article ads from Facebook, Capital One, and a clothing brand I’ve never heard of compete for my attention. Next, I go to The Washington Post, I see mostly the same topics in the headlines, as well as Joe Rogan and Spotify, and the Olympics (“The Games begin Feb. 4. What you need to know.”) I click on an article about the Biden administration putting more restrictions on coal plants. Here the ads seem more to do with the article, “Severe climate threats are increasing. These expert tips will help get you and your home ready.”

After that I go to NPR. “1 in 4 Americans say violence against the government is sometimes OK” reads the top story. Lastly, I go to BBC news. The top headline is about Ahmaud Arbery’s family being angry about a plea deal given to the people who murdered him. Under that “Trudeau calls trucker protest ‘insult to truth.’” I scroll down and click on “Lioness mauls zookeeper to death and escapes.” As I read about the lion that killed the zookeeper while being fed, animated text in a Popeyes ad informs me that the “$6 Big Box is back for a limited time!” next to a picture of fried chicken.

For the hour of nature I went to Mason Neck Park. There was a dusting of snow on the ground, and it was quiet except for some birds calling in the leafless trees above. As I walked down the trail I noticed that there were some large branches that look like they had recently fallen, and smaller trees had been bent and snapped. I thought that was probably due to the earlier heavy snow that fell at the beginning of January. At the end of the trail the forest ends, and a viewing platform overlooks the wetlands that the forest surrounds. The wetlands were frozen over, ice surrounding patches of mud with brown reed looking plants. There were birds in and around the wetlands, and I stood on the viewing platform taking in the view for a while.

From this experience I learned how my attention is affected by different things. In nature I was more aware of my surroundings and chose what to direct my attention to. On my phone things are made to try and get my attention, and information is extremely concentrated. Nature is not trying to sell me something, it was not made with humans in mind, yet I felt more satisfaction from experiencing the forest and wetlands than spending time on the internet.

By Jared Tankel

The computer screen flashes as different colors run across it. I sit there, mouth slightly ajar, eyes glazed over, as I absorb another fatuous video from my youtube homepage. I snap myself out of it briefly, only to fall back under the spell of the computer. Before I know it, an hour has gone by. “How has this happened?” I wonder silently to myself. “It feels like I only just sat down.” Deep inside I know that I already know the answer to this question, just like I always have. The youtube rabbit hole, as many call it, can catch your attention for hours, never letting you tear your eyes away. Once it has its grasp on you, there’s little you can do to escape, besides watch yet another pointless video. I sigh, realizing that another hour of my life is down the drain. Gone, never to be seen again. I wake myself up, standing up to stretch. I ask myself what I learned from the past hour and a smile begins to form on my face as I realize that I remember nothing at all.

I sit on the bench, listening to the stream and the water cheerfully gurgles down the slight decline that one may consider a miniature waterfall. I haven’t visited these woods behind my old house in a year, but now I sit in silence, letting the sounds of nature envelop me. I hear the chirping of birds, the rustling of squirrels in the brush, and the sound of footsteps behind me. I turn around and see a family walking their dog. We nod to each other and I resume sitting there in silence, deep in my thoughts, pondering whether or not the bird seated so precariously on the branch is a woodpecker or a warbler. I watch the sun begin to set over the tops of the trees, signaling that it’s almost the end of my hour here. I stand up and hear some sort of small animal that had settled near the end of my bench scurry away. I turn around and see a deer in the woods, making eye contact with me. I smile at it, thinking about all that I’ve experienced in the past hour. I vividly remember the water, the birds, the wildlife – every aspect of it, and how they all make me feel like I don’t have a care in the world. It’s not a feeling that one should take for granted and it not one that I would trade for anything.

In conclusion, this experiment was fascinating, as I rarely spend an hour with no electronic interference whatsoever. I feel like everyone who has a phone should try to spend a lot of time off of it, as you don’t realize how the stream of constant information tears you down until you have a break from it. Learning more from not having my electronics than from being on my computer didn’t necessarily surprise me, as the feeling that I had was more of a recognition that I spend too much time on my phone. I learned that I spend too much time on my phone, and sometimes we need a break from the stream of information, as too much information can be overwhelming.

By Daniel Seim

In my hour of mediated time, I experienced quite a lot. I spent the first roughly 20 minutes watching the AFC Championship football game, during which I observed quite a bit about team sports. This included that being in the lead of a game could potentially cause a player to play “safer” and thus worse.  I also saw that miscommunication can lead to frustration and anger between teammates which impacted their ability to perform.  During the game I also saw a few commercials and advertisements.  These included multiple Bet MGM commercials for sports betting featuring Jamie Foxx. There was also a Subway commercial featuring Steph Curry and Serena Williams which was obviously appealing to the sports fans watching the game.  There was an advertisement for the first ever all electric chevy Silverado is being released, marking another step in the shift towards a carbon neutral world. Cool sculpting is advertised, a method of targeted fat loss that I do not know much about but am not sure is healthy or even works. The last 40 minutes of my hour were spent scrolling various platforms, Instagram, news websites, and twitter.  In this time, I learned a good bit. Joe Biden is close to finalizing his pick for the supreme court after his campaign promise to nominate the first African American woman to the supreme court. I also learned that Great Britain as stated it will begin to supply Ukraine with anti-tank weapons to deter a Russian invasion. Also in international relations, I saw that Pakistanis can now travel to Qatar without a visa. In pop culture, I learned that How I Met Your Father is debuting on Hulu, marking the release of the spinoff series of the beloved How I Met Your Mother and Kanye West, now known as Ye, is releasing his second album on February 22^nd, 2022. I was also informed that some areas in the northeast were slammed with as much as 30 inches of snow falling in some areas. 

In my hour unplugged, or unmediated time, there were just as many experiences, but very different types of them.  To begin my hour in nature, I immediately noticed the number of birds that were in the riverbed I had found by my house.  There were more birds in this one area than I had perhaps seen in the last year easily.  There was a blue jay living up to its aggressive species stereotype. The biodiversity of birds in this one riverbed was pleasantly surprising. In my hour, I noticed a blue jay, a cardinal, a woodpecker, a hawk, and 3 different types of songbirds.  The male cardinals were seemingly competing for a single female’s attention, which left me chuckling about how similar their actions are to humans. The stream that is the remnants of a river was frozen solid straight through, and if left me wondering how thick ice needs to be to safely walk on it. I began to think about halfway through about how all of this had been roughly 700 feet from my bed for the last 8 months and I had never known it because I hadn’t taken the time to look. I got up at this point to move to a different location in the riverbed when I spotted a deer walking about a quarter mile away. I followed it at a distance as to not spook it and to my surprise I spotted a whole family of 7 or 8 deer hiding away. I tried my best to keep a distance out of respect and not wanting to scare them or make them run away.  This led me to start thinking about how my very presence to them could spell life or death which is why they were so cautious of my movements.  This was a super cool experience as I had no clue that such large animals were living so close to where I do. Deer are not necessarily the most interesting creatures on the planet but there is some beauty to seeing wild ones roaming around living their lives.  I tried to continue to follow their movements out of curiosity but they disappeared seemingly out of nowhere. I then remembered that deer coats are designed to disappear into this type of forest and it left me impressed with the efficiency of the camouflage.

This experience was genuinely one of the best assignments I’ve been given as a student. It combined critical thinking, environmental science, and a bit of psychology. It really made me realize simply how reliant I am on my phone and other mediated sources.  As McKibben said in his book, neither of these lifestyles are the perfect model for a happy lifestyle. These two hours showed widely different ways of experiencing the world and gaining knowledge. The best path for anyone in my opinion to move forward is to really think about each experience and what you gained from it. Evaluate what you gained from both and strike a balance with both elements in it. The hour I spent in the riverbed just watching and observing was one of the more peaceful times I have had in a very long time. It reminded me that “unplugging” and taking time to truly just yourself is extremely important.  You cannot just go off the grid in today’s society. There was important information gleaned from my time online that I would have simply missed had I been offline in the woods.  While most of what I learned in my hour that was recorded was quite frankly useless, some of it was quite useful in my future and can be applied in various contexts.  The best way to learn from this assignment for me is to strike a balance between time plugged in versus time unplugged.  Both have their benefits and as addicted as society is to their phones and mediated environments, we need to learn to unplug from each other and simply exist as ourselves and see the world for what it is. You might learn more by reading less.

By Anonymous

The last twenty minutes of a thriller show on Netflix: exciting, thrilling, and stimulating. Yet, several days later, although I remember at the time having some sort of interesting commentary or criticism of the show, I have no recollection of anything worthwhile (or even what happened in it) that I gained from watching it. Then, (what was supposed to be) fifteen minutes on Twitter, which—thanks to me stopping scrolling twitter to check my phone and respond to a few texts, and then opening twitter again (instinctively) on my phone turned to scroll some more—became something more like half an hour. I cannot remember what I was texting about, nor what I really got out of twitter aside from a few articles bookmarked for later (of which I have now read only one, which was, admittedly, quite good and important), a vague impression that I saw something funny, and a feeling of being upset about the political state of things (following news sources/journalists who write about the environment about the environment and politics does little for my mood). Although I felt exhausted, I continued: a popular online world puzzle game, “Wordle.” The word of the day? “Mount.” I texted my friends my score—one of them replied with theirs. Neat. Feeling somewhat worn out and scattered—my hour of “information” complete—without any feeling of accomplishment or productivity, I got up from my desk and wandered around my house in an aimless haze for a few minutes.

A few days later, I bundled up, prepared some coffee and snacks, packed a bag with some thoughtful reading materials (and a small notebook for notes), and grabbed a comfy lawn chair and headed out the door to the edge of my (decent-sized) backyard which borders on a forest-like area. Shivering, and cursing myself for not planning ahead so that I could do this on a warmer day (perhaps one where there was not snow on the ground), I poured myself some coffee from my thermos. I began reflecting on the McKibben piece (as I had planned to use this time for): what is so “fundamental” about this information, anyway?

I read some of my book (the 19th century German natural philosophy of Schopenhauer, for inspiration) for a while before putting it down and looking at the trees and forest while I chewed on the material in relation to McKibben’s. I looked at the English ivy which has been spreading in this patch of forest since before I moved here and (surprisingly) a squirrel as it skittered about, feeling aware of my body and how cold it was. I observed the way that each plant and organism strives and yearns to grow, to move towards light (in the case of plants), or to find food (in the case of the squirrel). I got up and walked around a bit, thinking. Schopenhauer, it seems, considers the information provided by nature (i.e., what it tells us about the world and existence) “fundamental” in a different (i.e., more metaphysical) sense then McKibben does. On the other hand, there is some compatibility—actually observing firsthand the way life goes on and interacts does tell us something fundamental. Drifting, it then occurred to me that the snow on the ground in conjunction with the invasive species and the winter squirrel actually says quite a lot about the environment and the anthropogenic effects on it. It occurred to me more people had paid more attention to their immediate natural environment, perhaps some of the choices humans made to cause climate change would not have happened. In any case, one other point McKibben made did occur to me, which was that I was demonstrating a point he made: my last couple years I’ve spent learning humanities disciplines in college has taught me the important skill of patient, thoughtful observation, and that since I have done this, the technological world has become increasingly less attractive to me in favor of one connected with people, with real life discussion, and with the environment. It’s a process, like the seasons changing and the water cycle which led to the snow on this very ground. I returned to my chair to scribble down some notes on this (mental) discussion, finished my coffee, my chapter, the last of my coffee, and my (second) hour of information.

Looking back on these experiences, I think the biggest thing I learned is that, as good as it makes me feel in the moment, I do not think that social media and most of my media consumption makes me feel very good. That vague exhausted feeling I got after spending too much time scrolling on twitter has been a familiar one lately, and I think I ought to be more intentional about why, when, where, and for how long I spend time on the internet. On the other hand, I did find an article which interested me, and which I plan on writing about in one of my other classes. This is to say that mediated information is not all bad or irredeemable, but rather that going about accessing this information mindlessly is perhaps not the most conducive to structuring my day very well.

My time outside (which, since it has gotten colder, I have not done in a while) was nice (although I do not exactly think it has convinced me to spend more time sitting outside reading in the cold…). In retrospect it provided me an important opportunity for reflection, and the realization that I spend much more time in the library reading philosophers talk about the natural world than I actually spend in said world. That is to say that what I think this experience has taught me is that an important part of chewing on ideas about the world is to not just think about them in abstract, but to go out and look for myself, and see what information the world itself has to offer.

Hello, my name is Shishir Sharma, a writer of this blog

It was around 6’O clock in the evening, and it was time for my walk. Usually, I tend to run in the evening, but I had to walk and experience it. I realized it, and I hadn’t been on a walk for a long time. My busy life and schedule constantly made me run from one place to another. First, run to college, then back home, then to work. I walked around my neighborhood area. It was pretty interesting. Before I went on a walk, I purposefully left my phone and headphones inside the house to experience what it’s like to walk “normally.” Without a phone and gadgets, I can see the real world. The cold wind breeze was touching my cheeks, and my brain was constantly looking here and there to find birds. When I was walking, I spotted a deer. It was amazing to see baby deer, and they were just too cute. That day I started thinking about life as usual and wondered the life before the internet. We didn’t have internet access until 2010; it took me to the good old days. After a walk, I felt fresh, all the doubts were clear, and more importantly, I felt productive. Walks are good for mental and physical health.

The same night, as usual, I use my cellphone before bed. It was around 10’O clock at night. I was on my phone watching Facebook, Instagram, and youtube. I started on youtube, watching soccer for thirty minutes. Then onto Instagram, watching someone tick-tock for another half an hour. Then by the time I watched Facebook, I had spent another 1-hour scrolling through my news feed and some random videos. I was supposed to be sleeping by 11, and now it’s midnight. Two hours of my sleep was wasted. It is just amazing what social media can do to us. It was nothing productive, then I felt tired and slept for a long time. 

One thing is sure in this life, and we will spend a lot of time on social media. This becomes a massive problem for the future generation. When I was younger, none of this would have been a problem. I’m one of those people my age who I saw on the internet very late. I first knew about the internet in 2012, after I came to America. My whole childhood, I had no access to the internet. Life was much easier back then, and people would finish their job and go to sleep. Even the children were so active. Every day I would end up with wounds from playing too much. I don’t remember what I watched on my phone, but I remember how hard it is to hike. Our phone is a silent world, and our life becomes a dystopian world. 

By Anonymous

In bed with my laptop, my phone, and a heated blanket. I like having background noise when I am doing other activities, so I put on the Simpsons. Something funny and does not require me to pay much attention. I use this time to scroll through Instagram and see what people are up to, occasionally stopping to watch a funny dog video. I use this time to relax after an especially long day of classes when I don’t want to think of any of my responsibilities. For one hour I endlessly scroll and intermittently look up to watch funny scenes in the show. It is nice to completely turn off your brain even for an hour. 

I dislike the cold. I tend to avoid the outdoors in the winter because overall it makes me grumpy. For one hour I went outside with no devices to see how it goes. I sit in a backyard that is backed up to woods. I watch small birds hop from tree to tree and squirrels run around. It was nice for about 15 minutes and then I began to get cold and grumpy. I started thinking about all the other assignments I must complete and honestly it just made my anxiety spike. I kept trying to look for something interesting to focus on, but nothing came up. I began to walk around the backyard looking under rocks or pieces of wood but found nothing. After the hour was over, I was so excited to go inside. 

After completing one hour inside and one hour outside I found that I was much more relaxed being inside. If it were warmer and I could go somewhere exciting I think my opinions would be different. In the spring when I go hiking or to the beach or pond, I am completely happy being with a friend and no devices. In the winter I am cold all the time and it puts me in a bad mood, so I don’t want to be outside for 10 minutes much less 60 minutes. I tend to need to be doing multiple things at one time, so not having a device is very unusual for me. I think most people now require multiple sources of entertainment feel fulfilled. So as we move into a world where everyone will need to be using their devices at any time we also must learn how to combine that with nature.