← All posts

I Wish I Were There: Why AI Landscapes Make Us Stop Scrolling

By 3 min read PsychologyArt
A young person sitting on a wooden bench in a wide green meadow under big white clouds, with a red bicycle resting beside the bench

I turn landscape and nature images that I create with AI into videos, bringing them to life with a range of AI tools. When these videos first got high engagement, I put it down to luck. I couldn’t stop wondering why people engage so much with something they can probably sense is artificial. Then, when the videos kept getting high engagement again and again, I decided to think about it properly.

In our daily lives we are always rushing. It’s as if we had suddenly been teleported into the middle of chaos: problems at work, problems in the family, problems with the people around us… It feels like fighting a war on a thousand fronts. And while we scroll, while we let social media rot our brains, we suddenly stop for a moment. In front of us is a fairy-tale landscape, and in that instant our mind starts thinking: “I wish I were there.”

We imagine that if we were inside those endless meadows that look as if they had stepped out of a painting, we would finally relax and all this rushing would end. That we would feel as relieved as a drowning person taking a deep breath.

I’ve been thinking about where this feeling of relief comes from. The Big Bang happens, the universe appears, and at the end of a very long journey, we evolve. Alone with nature, we learn to struggle with it. Nature, too, comes from a past as old as ours, untouched; it comes from our very core. And now that feeling inside us remembers those days, those lessons, that longing.

It isn’t only a feeling, either. In his 1984 book Biophilia, the biologist Edward O. Wilson proposed that humans have an innate affinity for living things and nature, and called it “biophilia.”[1] Research suggests this pull has a real echo in the body. In a study published in 1984, patients who could see trees from their window after surgery spent less time in hospital and needed fewer strong painkillers than patients whose window faced a brick wall.[2] In another experiment in 1991, participants first watched a stressful film and then videos of either nature or city scenes. Those who watched nature recovered from stress faster and more completely.[3] So even looking at nature through a screen can calm us a little.

Almost everything we have built on top of nature today comes from artificiality: cities, giant buildings, giant structures, traffic, exhaust fumes, pollution, noise, din. All of it is a prison we built with our own hands. And now, looking at that untouched, unspoiled landscape, we dream from behind the bars of the prison we caused ourselves. “I wish I were there,” we say.

Here’s the interesting part: none of those landscapes is real. The meadows, lakes and misty valleys I share don’t exist on any map. And still people stop, watch and say, “I wish I were there.” Maybe that is why they engage even though they sense the artificiality: what we long for isn’t the place, but what the place makes us feel. The calm we are looking for was never “there” to begin with.

Of course, all of this is a side effect of the desire to build an advanced civilization, of technology, of civilization, call it what you like; and sometimes it is a necessity. We can’t stop it, and we can’t prevent it. But so that we don’t become prisoners of the bars we have built in our own minds, we need to stop for a while and catch our breath.

We should leave the rush behind for a moment, catch our breath and look at the landscape. We should accept that happiness isn’t always ahead of us, in another moment, in another place, but right here, right now. Instead of “if only I were there,” we should be able to say, “I can find happiness here, too.” In the prison we built ourselves, we have no other choice if we want to protect our minds.

Have a good day, until we meet again.

References

  1. Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Harvard University Press.
  2. Ulrich, R. S. (1984). "View through a window may influence recovery from surgery." Science, 224, 420-421. doi.org
  3. Ulrich, R. S., Simons, R. F., Losito, B. D., Fiorito, E., Miles, M. A., & Zelson, M. (1991). "Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environments." Journal of Environmental Psychology, 11(3), 201-230. doi.org