David Abrams wrote a book called <i>The Spell of the Sensuous</i> (1996) that&#x27;s related.<p>The subtitle is &quot;Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World.&quot;<p>TL;DR: modern life is rubbish; go hiking.<p>Humans grew up in &quot;nature,&quot; whatever that means. Basically they were inside systems they didn&#x27;t make. They had to understand rivers, trees, birds, stars, plants, all kinds of stuff. At first they didn&#x27;t even have language, and before symbols, life was vivid and dynamic; there was no alienation.<p>Some people were (some people still are) shamans. Their job was to commune even more interestingly with the non-human world. For example they would study birds so much that they could imitate them and kind of live among them. They would develop complex ways of interacting with plants.<p>&gt; It is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture—boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and most importantly, the common speech or language—in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land.<p>Hunters also had intimate connections with nature. Spend enough time in the forest and you and your culture will develop sensual intuitions based on subtle bird sounds, so that you can tell without thinking that there is a large mammal thataway, from the way the birds are moving and chirping.<p>&gt; Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still <i>need</i> that which is other than ourselves and our creations. The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.<p>&gt; Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities.<p>The crucial event Abrams goes back to in order to explain the current detachment is the invention and spread of the alphabet, that is, the way of writing that is abstracted from natural symbols. Alphabetic literacy initiates a profound shift; McLuhan agreed. We begin to build an abstract world of ideas that is enormously powerful, and we also kind of lose touch with &quot;reality.&quot;<p>&gt; Plato, or rather the association between the literate Plato and his mostly nonliterate teacher Socrates, may be recognized as the hinge on which the sensuous, mimetic, profoundly embodied style of consciousness proper to orality gave way to the more detached, abstract mode of thinking engendered by alphabetic literacy. [...]<p>&gt; By continually asking his interlocutors to repeat and explain what they had said in other words, by getting them thus to listen to and ponder their own speaking, Socrates stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded by orality, and hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were accustomed. Small wonder that some Athenians complained that Socrates&#x27; conversation had the numbing effect of a stingray&#x27;s electric shock.<p>The climbers I know love it almost like religious people love their faith. It does become a &quot;lifestyle.&quot; They start saving up money for vacations in Spain and France and anywhere with big serious boulders. Some also get into spelunking. Most of these people that I know are otherwise academics and IT professionals, and climbing is a way for them to restore something ancient and combat alienation and burnout.<p>&gt; Transfixed by our technologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses—once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild and animate earth—become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary. [...]<p>&gt; We may think of the sensing body as a kind of open circuit that completes itself only in things, and in the world. [...]<p>&gt; The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth.<p>Exercise for the reader: come up with a way to coexist with technologies and thoughts as if those things were landscapes, mountains, animals.