Compared to some, I spend a lot of time tramping around outside and sleeping on the ground in a thin, nylon tent. When I factor my age into this comparison, I am now comfortably in my sixties, I suspect that relative to all people my age, I spend a lot of time tramping and sleeping outdoors.
Often, when I am getting ready for an overnight wilderness trek, neighbors and friends will ask me if it is advisable for someone my age to hike and sleep alone in the wilderness. I’ve gotten used to these types of questions, which although well-intentioned, often come in the form of accusations: “It is really safe for you to be out there, alone?” That sort of thing.
Safety, of course, is a relative condition, one that depends on place, experience and the resulting risks. Is it safe, for example, for someone with no wilderness experience to head out for a multiple-night, remote wilderness trip? Probably not. Likewise, it would not be safe for me to suddenly decide to climb Mt. Everest. I have no experience in mountains taller than 15,000 ft, and Everest stands at over 29,000 ft.
These extreme examples aside, the problem with noodling out where we are safest is made difficult by our tendency to mislabel some things as safe because they are familiar. I understand why people are concerned about my well-being when I am in the wilderness, outdoors, and out of a house. Most of us are accustomed to the comforts of home. We assume that staying indoors is the equivalent of staying well, staying safe. But we are mistaken. We have been deceived.
In the 21st century, staying indoors (which Americans do for 93% of their lives) equates to staying in front of a screen: six to seven hours, on average, daily. Indoors and screen-bound is, without question, a very dangerous place to be. Why? The more time we spend in front of a screen, the more our depression grows, and the sooner we die.
Depression, a sense of dissatisfaction or feelings of being unsettled, is an inescapable condition of life. What we need to be wary of is depression that is deep, prolonged and debilitating. Deep and prolonged depression, it turns out, not only feels bad, it increases our chances of an earlier death, eight years on average, from all causes of mortality: Heart disease, cancer, and of course, suicide. Conversely, the more time we spend outside, anywhere that’s away from a screen, the more our depression goes down and the longer we live. This is especially true in people aged 40 years and older.
Consider the following graph from a 2025 study, “Outdoor activity time and depression risk among adults aged 40 years and older: a cross-sectional analysis,” drawn from data of nearly 10,000 adults.
On the left side of this graph is the score of the Patient Health Questionnaire for Depression, the PHQ-9 scale, which measures depression symptoms from a score of “0” (none) to “27” (severe). A score of 10 or above indicates moderate to moderately severe depression, the debilitating, life-shortening kind.
At the bottom of the graph is the recorded weekly minutes spent outside, in any place (the garden, the park, on trail) that is away from a screen. The red line is the average drop in the depression score, moving from left to right. Note how, as the number of weekly minutes spent outside increases (moving from left to right), the depression score drops.
What does this graph mean? It means that spending time indoors, in front of a screen, depresses us and shortens our lives. Anything that threatens to shorten our lives is, by definition, not safe. Anything that counters that, such as going outside, reversing the negative effects of screen time, is safer for us. Why is screen time unsafe for us? Researchers are not sure, but I have a theory.
As we move through life, our principal task is to figure out who we are and why we are here. In front of a screen, a place I call the screen world, the task of figuring out why we are here requires very little effort. The screen world, in fact, encourages us not to figure out much of anything. The screen world wants to tell us things: who we are, or could be, if only we’d buy this product or download that app. The screen world’s mission is to convince us that “who we are” is the sum total of the million things that we are told to do and to consume: a formless, ever-shifting, consumptive identity.
The problem with the slippery state of being proposed by the screen world is that we are neither product, service, nor app. We are eternal spirits temporarily bound with transitory matter, that, combined, are locked in a relationship with an eternal Creator, the Alpha and Omega of all things. Constantly being told that we “are” because of transitory consumption and digital actions does not quite ring true. It creates within us a tension, a resulting rise in our sense of unease, a depression.
But why does being outside, away from the screen world, feel better and reduce our sense of depression? When outdoors and out of the screen world, we are surrounded by natural things that don’t suffer from this tension. The screen world holds no power over them.
Natural things, plants and animals, know what they are and why they are here. They demonstrate this by not resisting their created nature; their form is a manifestation of their function. They have found, and we can see in them, their reason for being. The acorn does not insist that it is an apple, nor does a bird identify as a fish. They exist, stay organized, and reorganize themselves according to their created function. We long for this state of contentment (from the Latin contentus, meaning “held together”), and, when we see it, we draw near it. Even if we do not fully understand it, we feel better. We feel hope.
We long to understand the whys and wherefores of existence. We long, in part, for the struggle inherent in figuring them out. To experience that struggle, to get closer to figuring out these questions, we must get away from the screen world, from constantly being fed transitory explanations about the point of existence which is, at its heart, an eternal experience.
The screen world tells us that life is “all about us.” The natural world reminds us that it is not; it is about the One who made us. To keep this contrast in focus, we need only remember the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom,” not “My kingdom” come, it says. “Thy will,” not “My will,” be done, it notes.
It is in that prayer, outside and away from the screen world, that we can find our place of greater safety.