Tim Cook wants you to touch grass. That's rich

Tim Cook has some advice for you: Get off your phone and go outside.

In a recent interview, the Apple CEO said he doesn’t want people using smartphones too much. “I don’t want people looking at the smartphone more than they’re looking in someone’s eyes; as if they’re scrolling endlessly,” he told Good Morning America. “This is not how you want to spend your day. Go out and spend it in nature.”

On its face, it’s reasonable advice. It’s also a strange thing to hear from someone who has spent decades building the system he’s now gently scolding people for participating in.

I’m old enough to remember life before any of this.

I didn’t get a smartphone until my early 20s. I was born in 1981, part of what might be the last generation that had a fully analog childhood. We were outside. Constantly. Hours would pass without anyone knowing where you were, and that was normal. That was the point.

I grew up in the Four Corners region of northwest New Mexico, one of the most beautiful places in the country. Remote enough that even now, when I go back and hike, my phone just stops working. No signal. No notifications. Just open, rugged space.

And now I go home and see people standing in that same landscape with their faces lit by a screen, in one of the most extraordinary places on earth and somewhere else entirely. It’s not their fault. We’re all addicted. That’s what makes this moment feel so strange.

Apple didn’t accidentally create this. It was built, refined, scaled. The constant pull — the feeling that the device is always there and always necessary. That didn’t just magically happen.

And Cook isn’t separate from that. He helped build it.

When he tells people to log off, it lands in a strange place. It sounds like a dealer telling you to be more responsible with the product. Use less. Take breaks. Go outside. Reconnect. But definitely don't stop buying the product. Buy it, just don’t use it too much.

Cook has spent years insisting he’s not political — he told GMA he focused on “policy, not politics," when asked about his ties to the Trump administration, including his recent attendance at the Melania screening. But he's made efforts to stay close enough to power to benefit from it. Praising leadership. Showing up when it matters for business. Staying quiet when it might cost something. It’s a pattern you see across the tech world right now, including from the industry's gay leaders, as The Advocate reviewed in its new cover story.

People call this neutrality, but it isn’t. It’s a choice, and it has consequences.

Because while people like Cook manage relationships and protect their position, everyone else is left to deal with what that silence allows. It’s not CEOs putting themselves on the line to defend transgender people right now. It’s workers, organizers, people without insulation. He could have taken those risks. He chose not to.

And that’s what makes this kind of advice feel hollow. Telling people to go outside assumes they have the time, the access, the space to do it. It ignores how much of modern life has been shaped by the very systems that made people dependent on these devices in the first place.

It also ignores something simpler: You don’t get to build the machine and then step outside of it. Which is why this doesn’t land as concern. It lands as detachment. As if the problem belongs to the people using the thing, not the thing itself.

If the people who built this system wanted something different, they wouldn’t offer advice. They would redesign the incentives that keep people hooked.

Until then, this isn’t insight. It’s hollow public relations.

If Mr. Cook ever wants to talk about it on a hike, he’s welcome to join me in New Mexico.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness @thedeadbetties

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