"Touch grass" is a contemptuous admonition to spend time outdoors and away from the internet, especially social media, spoken in response to someone exhibiting socially inept behaviour that suggests they are "chronically online" and undersocialised. While its earliest instances of use are not known, the phrase spread rapidly on social media, especially Twitter, beginning in 2019, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic began, and it continued to propagate throughout the first years of the pandemic, despite the dark irony of using it during times of social quarantine and lockdown, when public spaces could not legally be accessed by many people.
At the time of this writeup, telling someone to "touch some grass" is functionally equivalent to declaring "I consider your behaviour concerningly weird, and possibly evidence of mental illness." It expresses to the target and all onlookers that the target's behaviour is overly antisocial and should be subjected to derision, scolding, or even (based on obsessive behaviour on the subject of anime and video game characters) suspicion of having an inappropriate attraction to minors. It appears to be uncommon that the speaker of "touch grass" is met with a negative community reaction to their declaration; more often they are stating what others in the vicinity are already feeling on the matter, but do not wish to express out of a disinterest in internet confrontation.
Iron Noder 2022, 21/30