being chronically offline is in
On January 1st, I cozied myself up on my couch with my new Kate Spade journal, my mini printer, scrapbooking bag, and a head full of ideas. On the first fresh page, I taped down some super cute striped paper and overlayed my favorite picture of myself with my matcha (ofc) at La La Land (iykyk). If you flip the page you’ll then find my 2026 vision board and arrows to each picture with a quick couple words about why I chose that image for my board, what it means to me and how I envision it manifesting in my life this year. And finally (I haven’t gotten far beyond this part) is my ins and outs list and my 2026 bingo card.
The very first item on my ins list is having hobbies, one of my three main intentions for this year alongside health & wellness and knowledge & learning. The second one is what I want to write this article about: being chronically offline.
I’ve noticed an abundance of content in mainstream media, lately, promoting being unplugged. TikTok is embracing dumb phone, “rawdogging boredom” is a challenge for the survival of the fittest, and tech bros are admitting that they regret creating the online platforms that are destroying our society.
Online culture is so massive that we don’t remember any other way to live. We convince ourselves that checking mass media sources multiples times a day is okay because they keep us informed. But think about it this way: how many times do you habitually type in “y” to your search bar, “outube.com” is highlighted in because it is your most searched site, the homepage pops up and you see nothing interesting so you click out immediately? Because I can tell you it happens to me many times a day and I am no more informed each time I do it. How many times do you open your phone to ask your friend how their day was, *somehow* end up on TikTok, and forget why you picked up your phone in the first place? Even better: how many times a day do look at your home screen for the time, put your phone down, and realize that the time didn’t register to you and you have to look again?
This is not being informed. This is being susceptible. And we’re smarter than that, aren’t we? The human species has survived world wars, pandemics, literal evolution over thousands of centuries, only for today’s generations to complain when something isn’t convenient for them. I mean, heck, I complain after spending only 5 minutes searching for a peer-reviewed academic article because it’s just so much work. We are now so accustomed to the conveniency of the internet and evolving technology making it so that we don’t have to try anymore. Advanced search features and artificial intelligence are making us dumber, not smarter. Social media groupthink is making us too likeminded, not individual enough.
Logging off and consuming media purposefully is what will bring our world back together. Get out of that TikTok rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and if you’re still interested in the story when it’s not being dramatically embellished in short-form content, go read about it in a long-form article. Create your own opinion about what you do or don’t believe.
Being chronically offline is in. If I need to know something that happens on social media, my friends will tell me. If they don’t, it wasn’t something that I needed to know in the first place.
How lucky are we,
KB
