“Going offline, online:” The Internet Thrives on Black and White Thinking. Avoid Substituting One Extreme for Another

Going offline, online: the latest trend for 2026. Everyone is into vision boards, landlines, dinner parties, and ditching social media (allegedly). I say allegedly, because, of course, the promoters of these analog activities share them digitally. Content creators invite their followers “to watch them be bored” or post videos documenting their phone-free experience (which they capture on said phone they are not on). The popularity of this content gets at something nagging the viewer, which is the idea that a phone addiction equates to a personal failing.

The rise of artificial intelligence has revived the search for authenticity.

But we live in a world where even authenticity can be contrived. And contrived it is. In aesthetic canva created carousels on Instagram and TikTok. 30 fun and easy ways to “get your personality back.”

Looking back, the start of COVID was the first pendulum swing to becoming analog. “Zoom Fatigue” gave rise to fitness challenges, bread making, and Tiger King binging. But even then, there was still something communal about social media. We were all attempting to do the same things, but we were attempting to do them together. College students kept themselves motivated to exercise by tagging their friends on their stories when they completed their workout, or they had FaceTimes where they baked bread together and chatted, whether the focacia came together or not. We were inside but still searching for a connection. 2020 was the downfall of that unvarnished form of social media.

Fast forward to 2026, the solution to loneliness is deleting your online presence. The going “offline, online” trend is a status symbol. How much you can feign being unbothered and disconnected equates to your perceived social clout or maybe increased internal validation. It is an oversimplification to chalk up the general lack of connection to our phones.

Yes, our phones do contribute to a host of issues, namely increased anxiety, fried dopamine receptors, and lower attention spans. However, in the beginning, our phones made us feel less alone.

As an immigrant, I am grateful that WhatsApp was around when I moved because that is what kept me connected to my loved ones oceans away.

Maybe you are feeling alone because you are spending your day looking at the posts of people you don’t know rather than calling or engaging with the people you do know. Again, this is another oversimplification, but the larger point is that going offline is not a panacea for all of your problems. Most people are lonely. We need connection, and our phones and social media used to be the tools we used to help us find that. Maybe things shifted when we stopped using our phones as a secretary. The connection started online, but at least at some point morphed into something that happened, IRL or at least within a smaller subset of the online space.

Another thought I am grappling with is whether we as a collective are just different now because of how we’ve engaged with social media. Parasocial relationships, comparison, and an overreliance on the digital world may have changed how we as social creatures perceive and create connections. If most of social media is fake, yet we are seeking to replicate ways of creating community we see on social media, then perhaps the “communities” we are creating simply are never going to satisfy our need for connection because they were fake to begin with. But again, let’s try to avoid extremes.

The value in the “Going offline” trend for me is the reminder to experience life, not just observe it.

For fans of the Gilded Age, there was a scene in that show during the labor movement where workers chanted “8-8-8: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, 8 hours for what we will.” Maybe we lost the plot because we now spend our entire 8 hours of free time glued to our screens.