Awe: Unscreened

Kauai is known as the Garden Isle for its lush greenery, and the name is well deserved at that. But the feature that has continually impressed me the most is the scale and angles of the mountains that rise from the middle of the island. Any view from any angle is an awe-inspiring moment which cannot adequately be captured on photos. I still try, of course, on an ongoing basis. But this beauty cannot be captured on a screen. It needs to be felt and seen with no filters, or at least through a car (or helicopter) window and nothing else.

It's the same feeling I've felt often when hiking around Yosemite, and once as I drove to a peak near Big Bend. The monolithic heights, and sheer drop of the cliffs, have to be seen to be understood and appreciated fully.

It made me wonder if the meta augmented reality world promised in sci-fi that feels to be nearing nonfiction could ever, even with significant advances in technology, provide the same feeling, and inspire the same awe, as the real thing. I love technologies and futurism, but of accomplishing this feat, I am skeptical.

To the contrary, I believe the more plugged in to a technologically easier, comfortable, and productive life we are, the greater the need will be to travel to places like this and feel the wonder irl. When so much is possible through CGI and generative AI, the wonder is necessarily lessened as we are desensitized and trained to be skeptical of the images. Only when you are certain you can believe your eyes and behold the beauty of nature in its unedited, imperfect and organically generated form, and you feel those feels.

Perhaps the worst part is that our needs for these genuine, screenless experiences rise, so will the devastation of the natural beauty in service of our comfort, unsustainable consumption of resources and AI power needs, etc. Putting aside morality, it would be a simple logical tradeoff if we could simply replace the fading beauty with equally mesmerizing experiences, but I just don't think we can. 

There is a profound comfort in standing before something that wasn't built for me, wasn't designed for a user experience, and doesn't care if I’m looking. That indifference is exactly what makes it real. If we lose the sheer, terrifying scale of a cliffside to power the servers that mimic it, we haven't just lost a landscape—we’ve lost the ability to feel the very awe
we were trying to digitize.

Perhaps the future isn't about choosing between the digital and the natural, but about treating these real-world vistas as sacred sites of sensory truth. Protecting these places is a form of protecting our own humanity.