Touch Grass

"Touch grass" is an idiom, added to Merriam-Webster in 2024, meaning to participate in normal real-world activities, especially as opposed to spending excessive time online. Telling someone to "touch grass" is usually a pointed suggestion that they are too invested in an internet argument or community and should step away and reconnect with offline life.

The phrase is heavily used on Reddit as a dismissive retort in overheated threads, where it doubles as folk wisdom about the platform's own dynamics. It implicitly acknowledges that vote-ranked, always-on discussion can pull users into disproportionate intensity over low-stakes disputes. As such it sits alongside doomscrolling in the platform-culture vocabulary that critiques compulsive engagement: where doomscrolling names the passive trap, "touch grass" names the prescription. Its mainstreaming into a major dictionary reflects how thoroughly online-behaviour concepts, and the self-awareness about them, have entered everyday language.