The word of the month for August is a phrase: “touch grass.”

Gamers will tell you that the phrase “touch grass” is slang for “go outside,” and that the phrase is deployed when someone is spending an inordinate (inordinate even by gamer standards!) amount of time online. I’ve been told that the term is somewhat derisive and would be delivered in the same tone and for much the same reasons as “get a life.”

The Urban Dictionary has a more expansive definition of the term:

used when someone is doing something weird, stupid, or pointless. It means they need to come back to reality, they need to get some fresh air and get back in touch with how the real world works.

“Touch grass” is the phrase of the month because in this increasingly remote working world, we may sometimes need a reminder not so much to get a life but to get offline.

Don’t get me wrong. Becoming more proficient at working remotely has been a boon in many areas, including ADR and the academy. But it’s also true that remote work has made things feel, well, more remote. We are entrenched in computer spaces with their tinny audio and matte video, our attention increasingly segmented to follow the zoom meeting, the chat, the email . . .

And recent conversations about AI raise the possibility that we will see even more articulations of virtual infrastructure in academia and ADR.

This is not to say that working remotely is weird, stupid, or pointless. I’m grateful to communicate via this blog, in Zoom meetings, over the phone, in texts, etc. But technologies tend to flatten interactions, disrupt concentration, and reduce complexity—a tendency that human-centric ADR experts (especially process designers) need to take seriously.

So — touch grass!