My parents spent much of their youth working their way off small family farms in the Deep South. Then, newly middle class in the early 1980s, they sent me back every summer the second school was out.

The annual transition from the suburbs to the southwest corner of Georgia felt like changing worlds. My cousins were similarly sent South, and our grandparents’ farm was where we were unplugged — video games and cable television left behind for fire ant mounds, cows behind electric fences and no traffic lights for miles. Our parents weren’t worried we spent too much time indoors; nor was the summer vacation simply cost-effective day care. Rather, each year, they replanted us in the region’s red clay to live in the place where they were raised.

It was an ’80s version of touching grass. That phrase signals an intervention for people who spend too much time in a virtual world, lost in social media scrolls and digital debates detached from real life. It is two parts dismissive rebuke and one part self-awareness — those chronically online are admonished by others, and sometimes chastise themselves, to “go touch grass.” The idea is that interacting with the natural world directly,........

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