Werner Herzog and the Invisible Forest

Werner Herzog by Alan Greenberg

What caught my attention in Werner Herzog’s recent conversation with Conan O’Brien was not simply the wit or the eccentric delivery, but the clarity of an argument I had been waiting to hear.

For years now, concern about the digital world has been framed almost exclusively as a generational problem. We are told that the elderly struggle, that some of us in midlife lag behind, and that younger generations are somehow immune—native speakers of the internet, instinctively fluent in its codes. Yet my own experience suggests something far more complex. Not only do older generations struggle, but so do my contemporaries—and increasingly, so do our children.

My eldest son, now twenty-five, recently made a decision that surprised me. He chose to abandon the smartphone altogether, replacing it with a simpler mobile phone. His reasoning echoed many of the same anxieties voiced by older generations: distraction, loss of attention, erosion of presence. Until recently, I had regarded these arguments with skepticism, unsure whether they represented wisdom or merely fear.

Herzog offered a different frame—one that resonated deeply.

He proposed that early humans learned to survive the forest without instruction manuals. They learned which mushrooms nourished and which poisoned, not through formal education, but through instinct, observation, trial, error, and collective memory. Survival knowledge emerged organically, shaped by necessity and time. Herzog’s suggestion is that humanity will learn to navigate the internet in much the same way.

The digital world, like the forest, is dangerous and abundant. At first, we are poisoned by it—misinformation, addiction, noise. But over time, Herzog believes, we will develop an instinctive literacy. We will learn what sustains us and what harms us, not because we are told, but because we must.

What struck me most was not optimism, but trust: trust in human instinct, in cultural memory, in adaptation. Coming from a filmmaker, this makes perfect sense. Herzog has always believed that meaning emerges through struggle, not protection. Civilization, in his view, does not advance by shielding itself from danger, but by confronting it.

Perhaps my son’s decision is not a rejection of technology, but part of this larger process—a personal calibration rather than a retreat. And perhaps the unease shared across generations is not evidence of failure, but of learning still in progress.

If Herzog is right, then we are not lost in the forest. We are simply relearning how to walk through it.