Before anyone gets too suspicious, this is not a call to throw our phones into a hedge and live on acorns.
Technology is useful. It lets us work with people on the other side of the world, find our way home when we have ignored the satnav twice, and immediately identify the actor who was “definitely in that thing with the boat”.
But it also has a way of filling every available gap. Work follows us home. A quick glance at something becomes 40 minutes of scrolling. A break involves looking at a different rectangle.
Which is why Wild Tales feels so timely.
It is a community built around learning practical, often forgotten skills from people who have spent years mastering them. Foraging, fermenting, growing, mending, making, reading the seasons — the sorts of things our great-grandparents may have taken for granted, though presumably with slightly less romantic lighting than we now imagine.
The point is not to pretend that the past was perfect, or that everyone should immediately take up basket weaving. It is that there is something restorative about becoming a beginner again. About learning from another person rather than a tutorial. About making something with your hands and, ideally, not checking whether it has performed well.
Wild Tales brings people together for workshops, seasonal learning, meetups and time outdoors. In doing so, it makes a persuasive case for a healthier kind of balance: not escaping modern life, but giving ourselves a few ways to step outside it.
Perhaps wellbeing does not always mean doing less. Perhaps it sometimes means doing something entirely different — slowly, badly at first, alongside other people, with your phone in your pocket and soil under your fingernails.
That seems like a fairly good place to start.
