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We’re walking through Philips de Jonghpark in Eindhoven — pines, oaks, understory saplings, the kind of layered canopy you barely register until you’re suddenly inside it.
“This park is so much more than a walk in the park,” Pieter van den Braak tells me. It’s where he comes for inspiration — and where, years ago, he began finding his way back to himself.
The quiet slide downward
In his late teens, Pieter had one dream: become a professional basketball player. When that dream slipped out of reach, he wasn’t prepared for what filled the space — drifting between jobs, no clear direction for his studies, days spent on Netflix and gaming, mornings without motivation.
Not a dramatic collapse. Just the slow, heavy fog of not knowing what to do with your life.
“I got lost,” he told me.
Eventually, he did something almost embarrassingly simple: he went outside. Carp fishing gave him an excuse to sit alone in nature, and those hours by the water began to shift something inside him.
“It made me feel part of the earth again,” he said. Not lonely — connected.
Awe, insignificance, and the reset button
We talked about the meme: go touch grass. It’s meant as a joke, but it captures something true.
Standing under old trees or in open sky shrinks your worries just enough to breathe again. Writer Oliver Burkeman calls it cosmic insignificance — the strangely comforting realization that your problems are not the center of the universe.
“It brings you back into the here and now,” Pieter said. And once you’re here, the world looks different.
What immersion really means
When Pieter says “immerse yourself in nature,” he doesn’t mean a long hike or a sweeping landscape.
He means:
going outside without a goal,
slowing down without effort,
letting the surroundings reset your tempo.
A pocket park counts. Five minutes counts. A single tree outside your door counts.
“Start your day outside, not on your phone,” he told me. “Just five minutes. It changes everything.”
From personal healing to public storytelling
When Pieter tried telling friends how nature was helping him, most shrugged — I don’t know anything about nature.
That disconnect stuck with him. He wanted to build an online space that didn’t overwhelm people or shame them for not knowing species names — a place that made nature feel inviting again.
That became Nature Land (N8RLND), a media platform of documentaries, videos, and podcasts about nature’s impact on daily life. An antidote to doomscrolling. Inspiration instead of anxiety.
Their first documentary? New York City — proof that even the most concrete places hold pockets of wildness if you know how to look.
What the Internet of Nature means here
At the end of every episode, I ask each guest what the Internet of Nature means to them.
For Pieter, it’s simple: “A place where you can feel inspired instead of lonely.”
A place to connect with others searching for meaning, to rediscover curiosity, to remember that you’re part of something bigger.
As we wrapped up our walk, the trees around us felt less like scenery and more like steady companions — reminders that healing doesn’t always require a breakthrough. Sometimes it begins by stepping outside and noticing one living thing.
If cities want to support mental health at scale, maybe the first step is also the simplest: make it easy for people to get a five-minute nature microdose.
Happy trails,
Nadina
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