Rediscovering Humanity in a Digital World: A Guide to Living a Slow, Connected, and Intentional Life.
“I want to teach you how to return to that place of human connection with those around you and, most importantly, within yourself.”
In a world that is increasingly becoming more digitized, it can at times feel impossible to find real human connection, let alone a deeper sense of connection to oneself. Many of us are bombarded by up to 10,000 ads a day, pulling our attention away from the present moment and our true desires. Shifting toward a more intentional way of living can help us regain control over how we spend our time, fostering a sense of calm and inner peace.
I want to teach you how to return to that place of human connection with those around you and, most importantly, within yourself so you can learn to live a stress-free, slow, intentional, and satisfied life. One where you feel the freedom to love yourself, be yourself, and choose how you spend your time. One where you feel deeply connected to your husband and your children, all while remaining in touch with your deepest desires. The insights I desire to share on this channel seem infinite since I have discovered a deep sense of stillness in myself through my meditation practice. But today, I will offer three pragmatic tips in the format of questions you can ask yourself to start making significant shifts as soon as this video ends. Along with these tips, I will offer some of my own personal musings about humanity, as well as some story telling from my family’s recent trip to Wisconsin.
Hi. Welcome back to my channel. I’m Allie. I am a mom, wife, public school teacher, and certified yoga instructor living in the Midwest, making videos inspired by a quiet and mindful life about the art of being human. The following video includes scenes from my family’s annual October trip to our cabins in Wisconsin, reflections and meditations during my time there, as well as lessons for you and tips to help you implement these lessons today.
“Why is everyone acting like they ain’t human?” - Zack Bryan
In Zack Bryan’s latest album, The Great American Bar Scene, one lyric from the song “Northern Thunder” stands out: “Why is everyone acting like they ain’t human?” For me, this line captures the challenges of modern life that I mentioned at the start of this video: a profound loss of sense of connection to nature, our loved ones, and ourselves and the depth of our humanness.
Additionally, Bryan’s question, asking why we’ve strayed from our humanity, speaks to a broader issue—our tendency to avoid problems and deny the complexity of the human experience, which includes both joy and struggle. I think part of the reason we escape into our phones is to avoid the challenges of being human. Often, we think that our problems are unique, and we feel shame around our pain or even our truest desires for fear that they will make us “uncool” or, at our cores, unloveable.
This is nothing new; this problem is ancient…
And while I have assigned some blame to modern technology for deepening our sense of isolation, the truth is that the desire to escape our humanness is not new. It’s an ancient problem. I teach my 10th-grade students about the timelessness of this problem when we read the epic of Gilgamesh. This ancient Mesopotamian tale, discovered in the 1800s on stone tablets that have been dated back to 2000 BC (that is 2000 years before the most widely known book in our country, the bible), provides insight into humanity’s age-old struggles with love, loss, and the search for meaning.
Gilgamesh, a demi-God, loses his best friend, Enkidu, after seeking out glory for his strength. However, the loss of his friend due to his selfish desires is only one part of his ignorance. The more significant is his failure to understand that his grief is something all humans experience. Still, he thinks his problems are bigger and more significant than anyone else, and he denies his feelings through a quest for eternal life (only to discover really, that there is no such thing).
The Gods repeatedly tell Gilgamesh to surrender to his own humanity, but by the end of the story, we are still unsure of whether or not he has.
Often, I think many people spend their lives failing to surrender to their own humanity. An added layer to the internet and social media is that this is also no secret - people share themselves and their similar quest for youth or prosperity openly online, for better or worse.
All humans have access to the spiritual realm.
Growing up Jewish in the South and Midwest, I often felt disconnected from spirituality, as if God didn’t belong to me. But after my daughter was born, I experienced something profound—a deep sense of understanding everything, from the past to the future. It felt as though I had known her long before her birth. This moment reshaped my relationship with God, one now rooted in trust, love, and a feeling of synchronicity with the universe. If you are interested in a more indepth and transparent telling of my pregnancy and my daughter’s birth, you can find a link to a more intimate telling in the description box below.
For a long time, I hesitated to share this connection. But over time, I’ve realized that the relationship I’ve rediscovered with God isn’t exclusive—it’s one of the most common human experiences. It’s available to anyone who is breathing and aware. I’m not talking about subscribing to a specific religion when discussing this connection. Instead, I’m referring to universal laws, truths that become clear when we awaken to them—truths that are more concrete than we often admit and they are accessible to any living and breathing person, and you don’t have to be religious to find them, you just have to find some surrender to the human experience.
I mention spirituality because it's an undeniable part of what makes us human. While some may choose to ignore or deny it, the truths I’m about to share—about connection, self-awareness, and mindfulness—are universal. They are accessible to anyone and have the power to transform your life, just as they’ve transformed mine.
That’s why I resonate so deeply with Zach Bryan’s music. His lyrics reflect bravery in confronting those big, timeless questions: Why do people act like they’re not human? Why have we strayed so far from simple, basic truths that can bring us peace? These are the same questions the epic of Gilgamesh posed 2000 years before Christ, and they would still ring true today. Both remind us that, at our core, embracing our humanness and the deeper connections available to us is the path to peace.
Now I am asking you: Are you hiding from your own humanness with hours spent staring at a screen? Are you searching for something in others that you feel is lacking in yourself? Maybe you are, maybe you are not. I know I once was, and still do, unconsciously, from time to time. As a high school teacher, I see the desire to escape the evolution of the human spirit every single day. Kids feel more drawn than ever to escape into distractive technology that allows them to hide and postpone their own spirit. I would go as to say it is an epidemic. That is not meant to instill fear but instead from a place of deep yearning for others to wake up and start living a life full of meaning, as I have in the past few years.
If you’ve found this channel, it’s likely that you’re searching for something deeper than the quick ads and TikTok videos that often drown out genuine connections and create a sense of anxiety around scarcity. You’re beginning to tap into the profound understanding that life offers more than superficial distractions and fleeting moments of entertainment.
I want to give you three suggestions to help you step out of the trap of avoidance, numbing, and sense of lack and into an awakening of all the beauty that already exists in your world that, with time, will allow you to rediscover your humanness, and live a life full of meaning.
Universal Truths: Lessons Learned
First Universal Human Law: Take Responsibility for Your Life
Laura Doyle’s book The Empowered Wife offers a powerful question that has guided me: What am I doing that isn’t contributing to the peace I desire in my life? Focusing on what others are doing wrong is tempting, but it’s more empowering to ask how we might be contributing to the chaos. This question isn’t just for marriage but can apply to all aspects of life. Still, I have been implementing her suggestions in my marriage, and the results have been insurmountable and trickled out into all areas of my life. So a close relationship like your spouse I think is the perfect place to start!
So, when you are confronted with a situation in which you feel somebody else’s behavior is disrupting your peace, ask yourself, "What am I doing that isn’t contributing to the peace I desire?" Reflect on how your actions, reactions, or mindset might add to the chaos rather than focusing on what others are doing wrong.
I am suggesting you reflect on your contribution and take the focus off the person you feel is causing the problem. It might sound infuriating. Trust me, I know the feeling well. But it was actually so refreshing for me to realize how much control I have over my own peace, which is actually 100 percent control. It can be so easy to fall into the victim mindset: working out is too hard because my job keeps me too busy, I cannot eat healthy because it takes too much time to cook, or my husband and I always argue because of his bad attitude. Trust me, these are all excuses I have made before.
Let me give you an example from our trip to see if it helps resonate.
As we were finishing our packing the morning we were to leave for our trip, tension started building in me as my husband, and I had different expectations about when we would leave. At first, my point of view was that he kept asking me to do stuff that I had already done or that he was being nit-picky about how to place things in the truck. He had his head down as he was packing, so I assumed he was annoyed at me as I was at him, and this made me even more annoyed at him.
I wanted to make a snarky comment or even roll my eyes, but then I asked myself Laura’s question: “What am I doing that isn’t contributing to my peace.” The obvious answer was that I was having a bad attitude. Even if my husband was having a bad attitude too, I could choose my own peace. I could also offer to help in whatever way possible to help his bad attitude. I did, and it was magic.
The essential piece of this story is that I did not try to change my husband. I changed myself. For this to work in any and all areas of our lives, we must shift our focus from what others should change to what we can do differently to restore calm and harmony.
It is so easy to blame life for our own negative feelings, including but not limited to husbands, traffic, bosses, weather, cancellations, and laundry.
Even more so, it can be challenging to face our own bad behavior and take responsibility for how we contribute to tension, but this step is absolutely essential if we want to experience true peace and ease in our lives. By focusing on what we can control—our actions and reactions—we create space for harmony instead of conflict.
Most humans are not exempt from feelings of anger, annoyance, frustration, or even rage - but if we can find some surrender, take responsibility for our own actions and perspectives, and stop focusing on the faults of others, we will immediately see a difference like I did.
[clip with no music or overlay, just natural sounds]
So, choose one person or situation to practice with, just one. Maybe it is your husband, your child, a friend, or rush hour traffic on the way home from work, and ask yourself: What am I doing that isn’t contributing to the peace I desire in my life? Am I worrying about being late? Am I choosing to have a bad attitude? Am I feeling personally victimized by the route I chose to take home or the way someone else wants to pack? Perspective is everything.
Second Universal Human Law: We See What We Look For (Capturing B-roll)
Listen, I am no stranger to depression. And I am not suggesting that unfortunate life events or brain chemicals are anyone’s own fault. But I am suggesting when we wake up to the truth that we are not alone in these experiences and that it is actually we who have control over our own perspectives, how we spend our time, which situations we stay in, and which ones we leave, our very own human rights that exist within every single one of us, we can find freedom and peace of heart.
After we have practiced no longer being victims and taking ownership over our own life circumstances and peace, we now have the time and space to fill our lives with more of what brings us joy. But by this I do not mean buying more things or isolating ourselves from our phones to now hide the fact that we have realized we were a large contributor to our dismay. Again, I want to talk about perspective, but this time, with the art of paying attention and seeking joy and beauty.
After a year-long hiatus from social media, I started sharing online again after the birth of my first daughter. I felt refreshed and authentic in my voice, but there were many times I still found issues with contributing to the “highlight reel” culture. Making these YouTube videos as a platform to share my musings on the world has actually felt much more authentic because as I am learning to capture strong b roll, I have shifted my attention from a lens of performing curated content to capturing beauty in the mundane.
Creating beautiful, meaningful "B-roll" (supplementary footage) doesn’t mean curating your life to look perfect—it means appreciating the details that already exist. It’s not about buying new things or fabricating moments for social media. Instead, it’s about recognizing the beauty in what’s already around you.
This skill of capturing beautiful B-rolls has had a profound impact on the things I pay attention to in my everyday life, with or without a camera in my hand.
The question to ask yourself here, whether or not your filming, is where is the good broll at? Maybe that sounds silly, but sometimes the sillier something is, the easier it is to remember - trust me, I am a school teacher! So, start by paying attention to what’s happening around you in real-time, especially during routine parts of your day. Instead of trying to curate a perfect life online, look for meaning in the simple details that already exist—like your child’s face after they finally went down the park slide by themselves or your husband’s smile after he takes the first bite of your cooked dinner, or the warmth of the sun on your face during your morning commute.
My student Lizzie, now majoring in photojournalism, taught me that great photographers and videographers look for the reaction, not the action. We’re often drawn to highlight only the best moments for social media, but a meaningful "B-roll" isn't about perfection. It's about capturing the quiet beauty that makes life rich and full. Instead of trying to buy new things or create staged moments, reflect on how you can frame what’s happening naturally.
So, you can just practice asking yourself where the good b-roll is and draw your eyes to those areas of your life, or you can use your phone or camera as a tool for mindfulness as I did during our trip up north.
After taking full responsibility for my attitude during the trip, instead of focusing on capturing the perfect photo of my family, I found myself relaxing into the imperfections of the trip. I didn’t stage anything - instead, I opened my eyes to what was happening right in front of them and found that everything was already beautiful - there was no staging or curating needed.
Third Universal Human Law: The Law of Inspired Action
This one is essential if you want the other two I have just covered to work, and it may be the most basic and obvious of them all, but at times, it can feel the most allusive, and that is to put what you have learned in this video about responsibility, perspective, and the art of paying attention into action
Even as I write this, doubts arise about whether my video footage makes sense or if my suggestions might be too lofty. Reminding myself that my desire to reach other like-minded humans is to help others discover health and happiness will never transpire unless I continue to take action is what keeps me going. It seems so obvious, yet it is what holds us back from our own success and freedom.
While discovering content: books, videos, mindsets, or any sort of knowledge is the first step, it literally matters none unless that knowledge or insight is acted upon. In fact, none of this will crystalize for you until you act upon it in real time, in your real life.
It’s often our fear of failure or shame that holds us back. But again, no human is exempt from failure or shame - it is something we all experience. Still, we numb out and hide or seek safety in things that will never provide for us in the way we hope. We go on a quest like Gilgamesh, self-sabotaging, because we believe our pain is more significant than everyone else and that, somehow, our healing exists in material objects and not our own hearts.
So the question here is, where am I avoiding taking action in my life? You don’t have to think about this in such lofty ways. Start with the two other laws I suggested. Are you failing to take responsibility for yourself? Are you focused on the wrong things?
Action can look as simple as putting down your phone at the end of this video, apologizing to someone you love, and deciding to dedicate an entire evening to being present with your family, tech-free.
So, with that, my inspired action is to stop mulling over whether or not what I share in this video will hit, accept the outcome either way and continue to look for meaning in all the right places.
There is no better time than now…
If you are craving more from your life, if you know something needs to shift, I invite you to dive into these transformative techniques. I’ve created a special PDF for you featuring three thought-provoking questions and plenty of space for your journaling reflections. I love placing these kinds of prompts right on my nightstand or next to my bed, where I can see them as I wind down each night and first thing in the morning.
Imagine the excitement of trying this for a full week and seeing shifts in your experience of your life and the world. I’d be thrilled to hear about your experience, so leave me a note in the comments to share how it went!
Also, don’t forget to check out the link to my essential reading list, packed with foundational books that have shaped my way of living and being. If you're interested in diving deeper into your journey, this is the perfect place to start!
This fall getaway with my family was deeply refreshing and inspiring. So, to some, it may appear simple, but it’s all about our perspective, and I choose to see it as magnificent and beautiful.
If you found value and inspiration in this video, I would love for you to like it and subscribe to my channel as I continue to share my heart and tips for a more meaningful life.
Again, if you are interested in my birth story, you can find a link in the description box. I have also posted the transcript for this video to my blog if you want to read the print version there.
I am so thankful to those who are reading. Remember to drink water and more soon!
