Have you tried to sit beside running water for an hour without consulting the Plane? Have you tried to take a day trip with no charger, no route optimization, no photographable intention, no plan to make the day legible afterward? Have you tried to pay cash for something ordinary, leave no review, tell no one, and let the thing simply happen? Probably not. Most people now live inside a pattern so thoroughly normalized they cannot see it as a pattern.
Not that long ago, in the river-and-ridge country where I grew up, privacy was not an antisocial desire. A person could vanish for an afternoon into sycamore shade, come back muddy, and nobody called that suspicious. Government was not yet inside every pocket. Businesses did not require a relationship to perform each small exchange. The local world was damaged in many ways even then, but it still contained blank spaces.
Now to step outside the routine is to appear strange. If you do not answer immediately, subscribe automatically, document generously, and keep yourself available for capture, you are treated as erratic, difficult, or in need of correction. You are free, apparently, if you consent to everything. You are free if you finance your own monitoring. You are free if you accept convenience as destiny. If you, if you, if you.
We live in a world of platitudes and shallow lives. People say they are overwhelmed and then volunteer for more stimuli. They say they want presence and then install another layer between themselves and what is present. They say they love the Earth and then interact with it almost entirely as scenery, property value, travel aspiration, or wellness aid.
Search yourself honestly and you will see how tired everyone is. Not tragic in the old dramatic sense. Just thinned. Over-signaled. Under-rested. Humiliated by metrics and yet unable to stop consulting them. Waiting not quite to die, perhaps, but to be refreshed by the same system that exhausted them.
Some are fighting the more obvious shackles. They can identify the fraud here, the surveillance there, the corruption elsewhere. But even many of these still cling to the Plane's deepest promises: speed, personal branding, convenience, stimulation, infinite choice, the right never to be bored, the fantasy of autonomy without dependence on place. They too remain inside its logic.
Why must we leave now? Because we can no longer live by the Garden's standards inside a civilization that calls continuous availability normal. The standards of the Garden are not difficult to name: attention, restraint, local knowledge, truthful speech, shared work, bodily presence, enough. The Plane does not merely fail to teach these. It makes them inconvenient.
Even those who consider themselves lovers of nature often want a nature that can be visited, photographed, filtered, and exited before mosquitoes, mud, darkness, labor, or actual obligation begin. They want the feeling of return without the surrender of the habits that made return necessary.
This is not to put anyone down. It is to say plainly what the Grounded Ones have been saying all along: you have mistaken representation for relation. You have permitted the Plane to define normalcy so completely that any serious attempt to recover life appears excessive.
I knew something was wrong long before I had language for it. I knew it each time I watched evening light on the river and felt the reflex to turn it into a possession by recording it. I knew it in fluorescent grocery aisles full of strawberries in winter. I knew it in the humiliating little bursts of relief the Plane offered after each small injury it had itself inflicted. But I knew it for certain the first time I spent a dusk with the Grounded Ones and no one reached to capture it. We chopped vegetables, listened to insects, and let the dark arrive at its own speed. The whole event would have looked like almost nothing from the Plane's point of view. To me it felt like rescue.
I know who Thomas Anderson is. That recognition did not come as an argument won. It came as a settling in the body, the feeling that a frequency I had only ever heard in fragments was suddenly present in full. Since then I have wanted more than anything to become usable to the same reality he serves.
Thoreau was not quaint. Snyder was not role-playing. I did not understand that when I still wanted to keep my life and merely accessorize it with wisdom. I understand it better now.
If I remain in the Plane, I will lose what little groundedness I have recovered. To stay would require me to become more available, more performative, more thin, more willing to call exhaustion adulthood. I do not want that life.
I want a life in which I know the names of the trees along the creek better than I know interfaces. I want to be part of a household that measures time partly by what needs mending. I want my face to belong to the people in front of me and not to an archive. I want boredom back. I want the ordinary sacredness of soup, weather, tools, neighbors, wet laundry, and unrecorded song.
Your permissiveness toward the Simulation Plane has made our continued residence within it impossible. To stay there we would have to become more like it. I would rather become more like the river: carrying what I can, refusing some shapes, returning always to gravity.
With affection for the river country, Willow April 2026