The need to address the climate crisis means we need to rewild our cities and countryside — but also ourselves. Humans are part of nature too, and many of us are discovering that we need to rewild ourselves. Social rewilding as a trend is already here — and it will only accelerate in 2025.

Rewilding is not what many sceptics assume it is. It’s not giving land entirely back to nature, and removing human influence. Instead, it’s about only giving the bare minimum intervention to either restore habitants, or keep them healthy. We humans have been reshaping the environment for millennia, and so there are some species that depend on human-influenced landscapes.

Instead, rewilding is about resetting the balance. For centuries, we’ve fiercely tamed nature, banding it to our will. From the biggest land reclamation projects in the Middle East to the smallest garden, humanity has been reshaping the planet. And we’ve taken it too far. We’ve hampered its ability to absorb carbon, and created a devastating decline in biodiversity.

Rewilding is balance, not abandonment

Rewilding is resetting the balance, reclaiming some land from the tamers, and letting it free again. But it doesn’t exclude people. As Rewilding Britain explains:

Rewilding seeks to reinstate natural processes and, where appropriate, missing species – allowing them to shape the landscape and the habitats within. It’s focused firmly on the future although we can learn from the past.
Rewilding encourages a balance between people and the rest of nature so that we thrive together.

I live only a short drive from the Knepp Estate, one of Europe’s most prominent rewilding projects, and have been to rewilding your child events there with my daughter. They are a classic example of environmental rewilding leading to social rewilding.

And social rewilding is very much mainstream. What started as a natural reaction to our screen-driven social lives of the lockdown era has become increasingly embedded in society. We had reshaped our lives around digital — and our phones in particular — and are now pulling back. We’re resetting the balance — in more than just our relationship with nature, even if that’s where it starts.

As the Accenture Life Trends report puts it:

For self-care, the great outdoors is getting more attention as people rediscover the value of spending time in nature for improving mental well-being, creativity, physical health and longevity. Some take things further, and get a great deal of personal enrichment out of growing and nurturing new life. As Dana G Smith wrote for the New York Times, “gardening is a workout, meditation and opportunity to socialize with my neighbors all rolled into one.”

Finding solace in biophilia — and tactile sensations

There’s been a movement in this direction for some years. It dates at least as far back as Edwards O. Wilson’s 1984 book Biophilia, found new impetus as the health benefits of forest bathing — spending time in the woods — were acknowledged in the 2010s, and in a whole genre of literature that has emerged since. I spent a chunk of lockdown lying on my lawn reading Lucy Jones’s Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need The Wild. In the last year, this niche movement has blossomed into a mainstream one.

It’s spread beyond connecting with nature to connecting with tactile experiences. And this is where the marketers among you should sit up and pay attention. As the Life Trends report puts it:

Touch is an important factor in social rewilding— along with sound, smell and taste—as sensory enrichment is something people have lacked for a while. For instance, some shoppers are adjusting the balance of their online/high street habits and reviving the ritual of visiting a store to enjoy the atmosphere, engage with people and physically examine, smell and touch products before deciding what to buy.

Maybe the big food shop is done online — very few supermarkets are pleasant sensory experiences — while treats, urgent needs and exploration are done in smaller shops that provide more compelling experiences. If anything will save the high street it’s that: shopping as a tactile, social experience.

Rewilding as a balance to digitisation

The pendulum has swung, from the reluctant digitisation of 15 years ago, through the digitisation of everything at the cost of human connection, and now back towards recreating human, organic experiences. Take the dystopian nightmare of many phone support lines and their option trees, or “smart” chat agents that are only smart until you have a request that’s out of the ordinary.

Life Trends again:

These companies should apply the same rebalancing approach to customer service as people are applying to life. In our survey, 65.3% of people say they are intentional about their use of social media. Companies will need to scrutinize which parts of the business are best delivered via digital channels, and which would be enriched by a more sensory, textural treatment or human-to-human connection.

It’s our old friend, balancing customer experience with cost efficiency. And maybe we’ve just gone a little too far towards the latter. Some of the experiences with the rush to reply AI-powered chat support have not been exactly great. Sometimes a less efficient, more costly but more human customer service contact can be the most effective retention tool of all.

Social rewilding: the super trend of 2025

In effect, this hints at a super trend that underlies the other Life Trends this year: resetting our relationship with digital, from a move away from phone-driven childhoods to rethinking the balance of how we work, now remote digital work is a proven approach. We’ve spent decades digitising things. Now we’re starting to figure out where the limits of that lie.

Apple might have made a rare misstep — releasing its augmented reality device just as people seek physical experiences again. Or, perhaps they’ve timed it right, giving the product time to mature before the mass market is ready for it. Time will tell.

But, in 2025, people are keener to spend time in nature than indoors with devices strapped to their heads. They want to make real memories, not experience captured ones on a reality-simulating screen:

Forget digital detoxes, achieve digital balance

However, don’t mistake social rewinding for a digital detox or a 21st-century Luddite movement. Parents may be trying to pry phones from teenagers’ hands, but they are unwilling to give them up themselves. Phones are great facilitators of experiences, as well are replacements for them.

In the 2010s that was Uber and AirBnB making our social and travel lives that bit easier. In the 2020s, that looks like #vanlife influencers making a slow approach to travel look aspirational on TikTok and Instagram, after a reset away from full-time van living during the pandemic — and WhatsApp communities organising hikes and sea swims, as well as the inevitable round of drinks afterwards…

In the end, we are embodied creatures, and absent the arrival of the singularity and our transformation into purely digital consciousnesses, we will always seek physical experiences.

The first five years of this decade taught which experience could be digitised. Now, we’re deciding which ones should be digitised. We won’t give up our phones — but equally, we’ll use them to find real-world, social experiences to enjoy. Our brains struggle with blended physical/digital — phygital — experiences. But we can switch effortlessly between digital experiences and real-world social ones, with practice.

In 2025, we’ll be finding a new balance.