An essential part of having a smartphone is hating yourself for it. The self-awareness that smartphones are bad for us, and that tech companies are evil for addicting us to their apps, is proof of sanity. In recent years, the predictable masochism we feel while scrolling has found an equally predictable remedy: nature. Nature is the opposite of smartphones—it is as good for us as smartphones are bad. And the call of the wild has never been stronger. Going on an unplugged yoga retreat in Costa Rica, renting a cabin without Wi-Fi upstate, trying out the ancient Japanese practice of forest bathing—these are celebrated forms of digital detox, even if they’re undertaken with the vague shame of knowing that returning from the woods means returning to your phone, when you will almost certainly post photos of the nature you saw while detoxing.

I’ve found myself in the same situation, locked in a constant battle between unplugging and plugging back in. When I recently checked my iPhone Screen Time data, it reported an average of 4.5 hours per day. Should I be embarrassed? I wondered. What number was respectable? My boyfriend’s total gave me the frame of reference I was looking for: 1.5 hours.

A strange thing I noticed, though: Many of those phone hours were spent transporting myself to the rugged peaks of the Canadian Rockies and Gatorade-blue glacial lakes of Patagonia via the many outdoor adventure Instagram accounts I’ve followed in recent years. My feed is my off-the-grid pipe dream, yet I don’t seem to care much about the wilderness available right outside my own metro area. Last summer, my boyfriend and I took a day trip out to Walden Pond, just a short drive out of Boston. Did I sit on the shores of the iconic body of water that inspired Henry David Thoreau’s most famous work about the beauty of nature, scrolling through my feed of other blue lakes, other trails through pines, and offers for 15% off at Backcountry.com if I use the code CHOOSEMOUNTAINS15? Probably.

It was my social media-less friend Kristen (she doesn’t even brag about it) who first mentioned iNaturalist to me. After she deleted her Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts permanently, she was looking for a collaborative way to learn more about the native plants in Los Angeles, where she had recently relocated. iNaturalist describes itself as “an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature.” The open-data project allows users to log their observations into a map, as well as contribute to others’ observations. (For example, if someone identified the genus of a plant, and you know the species, you can add to the observation.) iNaturalist has a partner app called Seek for people like me, who don’t even know the names of the house plants they own, despite having traveled to a store, intentionally picked them out, and then paid money for them. Seek assists citizen scientists in the making by using image recognition technology to identify a species when you hold your camera up to it. It has been described by various news outlets as “Shazam for nature.”

If my problem was that my phone made me feel uninvested, or incorrectly invested, in the world around me, maybe learning about the nature outside my door was the solution I needed. Sure, solving my phone use issue with an app might seem counterintuitive, but iNaturalist sounded so beautifully earnest. I wanted to bathe myself in the slow-living energy of lovely middle-aged people who only use biodegradable shower products because the pipes of their century-old Victorian home are extremely sensitive, and come out the other side cleansed of my inclination to browse Instagram ads for direct-to-consumer couches when I already have a perfectly fine couch.