The Moth We Pity
“You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.”
Jay Alto’s quote was mentioned on a podcast recently, and I happened to be listening to it while walking through a nature reserve, surrounded by migrating birds, and I remember feeling a bit daft in that moment, listening to someone talk in my ear when I should have just been present, actually experiencing the birds chattering around me, because the quote, paired with that exact situation, made the whole thing feel slightly absurd, leaving me sitting there in the ‘periwinkle’, soaking up the moment.
We don’t confuse screens with reality out of ignorance, the way a moth has no frame of reference for the moon, but in a way that feels far more deliberate, repeated often enough that it begins to resemble acceptance or norm.
I still catch myself doing it, mid-conversation or mid-thought, reaching for my phone without any clear reason, and I suspect most people do, particularly those of us old enough to remember life before the internet reorganised everything around itself, who have a genuine before and after to compare, and despite that awareness, continue to choose devices etc.
What Presence Reveals
I notice this most clearly in interview situations, where some of the most useful signals I’ve ever relied on had very little to do with what was written on a CV/resume and far more to do with what revealed itself in the first few moments of someone entering a space, before they had time to adjust.
There is a kind of information that only exists physically, in whether someone looks up, whether they are curious, in the details they choose to wear, their trainers, their T-shirt, their overall aesthetic, and the way they carry themselves before they become self-aware of being observed.
It’s also something that only really functions in person, and while screen culture hasn’t removed it, it has allowed it to weaken through disuse. Video interviews flatten the very qualities you are trying to assess, and what you increasingly encounter are people who are fluent online, comfortable, articulate, and controlled, yet noticeably uncertain in a room full of strangers, as if the translation between those environments is not as seamless as we assume. It becomes difficult not to feel that something important has been quietly lost.
The Illusion of Inspiration
The same pattern carries through into creative work, where the illusion of immersion and research is easily mistaken for the real thing. A team opens Pinterest or Instagram, an hour passes in a rhythm of scrolling and saving that feels purposeful, and it gets labelled research or moodboarding, even though what is actually happening is something far more contained.
An algorithm designed to show you more of what you already respond to cannot produce inspiration in any meaningful sense, because it removes the very condition that makes creative thinking possible: friction and an emotional context, its one of the reasons I refer to my library - actual experiences and obscure bookmarks.
Real ideas come from interruption, from walking through a place rather than browsing it, from noticing something that wasn’t selected for you, and there is a difference between discovering something and being shown it. Serendipity doesn’t operate on a feed, and what these platforms offer instead is a version of the world that has already been processed and approved, resulting in work that is often competent but rarely surprising, because it is built from material that has already been validated.
Raised in Visibility
What is perhaps most interesting is that the generation most embedded in this environment is also the one beginning to resist it, and that resistance feels less like rejection and more like recognition.
Gen Z were born into digital life, which may be precisely why they are more aware of its limits, and why there is a growing tendency to step back, to detox, or to engage more selectively rather than remaining constantly available, something you can see not only in behaviour but in experiences themselves, where more spaces now require the absence of phones as a condition for presence.
At the same time, this is also a more sensitive generation, shaped by constant visibility and the awareness that almost any moment can be recorded or shared, and that awareness changes behaviour, making people more considered, more cautious, and often less willing to take risks or to fail openly, even though those moments are where growth tends to happen.
What emerges is a generation that is more intentional and restrained, navigating a world where visibility is constant and exploration is quietly constrained by the possibility of being seen.