everyone wants to log off, but who actually can?

Source: everyone wants to log off, but who actually can?, raya, 33:11, uploaded 2025-08-25, Watch Later position 371.

The video opens with a person saying that social media has taken away her sense of style. She still has a personality, although she no longer knows what she likes after seeing so much of everyone else’s life. Around her, short clips offer the usual remedies: stop consuming content, find things to do besides scrolling, and take a dopamine detox. A second clip says that going offline has become a status symbol for people whose life and livelihood do not depend on being online.

That is the tension raya follows for the next half hour. People are tired of the feed, yet the internet now carries work, money, relationships, information, and the small tasks of daily life. A person can want to disappear from social media and still need Amazon, Facebook Marketplace, LinkedIn, email, or a platform that makes their work visible. Disconnection has become desirable partly because connection has become compulsory, and that makes the ability to disconnect a class question.

A life lived inside a commercial

Raya remembers a time when disconnecting was simple. A landline stayed in the house, a VCR recorded a programme for the next day, and there was little to connect to outside the home. Daily life now sends people online to make payments, submit assignments, check email, buy things, and scan a QR code for a restaurant menu. The phone enters the dinner that was meant to be a break from the phone.

The feed compounds that practical dependence with a more theatrical form of attention capture. Raya compares social media with a casino: bright signs compete for the eye, while an unpredictable next item keeps the person scrolling. The uncertainty supplies the hook. Short videos then turn every platform into a shop. TikTok Shop, YouTube Shop, and Amazon storefronts place products inside ordinary-looking posts until a morning update about oversharing becomes an invitation to become an affiliate.

One clip used in the video gives the system its own small case study. The creator says that her Amazon storefront brought in $500 on each of the previous two days, then urges viewers to make a storefront and post products on TikTok. Raya hears a pyramid-scheme quality in a culture where creators teach people how to grow by selling the same advice, then encourage them to buy products they would not otherwise use in the hope that a brand will notice them. The platform turns the wish to belong into a route towards more selling.

Online identity follows the same pattern. People get sorted into narrow styles such as cottagecore, dark feminine, classics reader, or romance reader. The categories give the feed a simple way to recognise and sell to a person, whilst making an ordinary mixed taste look like a failure of classification. Raya links this pressure to the popularity of “brain rot”, which Oxford named its 2024 Word of the Year. She reads the term as a cultural sign of concern about repetitive, low-value media, fragmented attention, and the amount of entertainment available at every hour.

The video also includes AI-generated images, Pinterest buried under advertising and AI slop, and the feeling that social media gives people the appearance of connection whilst leaving them detached from the room around them. Raya connects that detachment to loneliness and to the convenience of staying home with Netflix and a feed instead of meeting people. These are claims made in the video. The source provides no study that would measure how much social media causes loneliness or concentration problems.

The fear of missing out keeps the apps in place. Raya jokes that deleting TikTok could mean missing the viral footage of the Astronomer chief executive and his colleague at a Coldplay concert. The joke works because the event became a shared cultural reference only through the same systems people say they want to leave. Social media still carries the conversation, even when the conversation concerns the damage caused by social media.

The older social function of the feed has also weakened. Instagram once presented a chronological list of friends’ posts. A person could reach the end and leave. Raya describes the current feed as endless, repetitive, and shaped by advertising, which makes casual posting feel pointless. Ordinary people post less, whilst professional creators post to grow an audience and attract brands. A photograph from an ordinary day has little chance against an influencer’s polished trip from Bali to Venice, and the algorithm may bury it before friends see it.

Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker, supplies the same complaint in an inserted clip. He misses the breakfast photograph, the coffee on Instagram, and the mundane details that once made social media feel like a record of ordinary life. Those posts now compete with AI-generated material, dramatic headlines, and influencers who have turned their lives into a professional surface. The feed has made normal life feel too small to publish, even though normal life was once the material that made social media social.

Long attention as a form of escape

The exhaustion produces its own set of trends. Raya points to Mapu’s TikTok series “things I consumed this week instead of doomscrolling”, where the creator shares articles, Substack essays, video essays, and other long-form work. The posts receive millions of views and thousands of saves, which raya reads as evidence that many people want material that asks more from them than a short scroll.

Instagram carousels now recommend books and offline activities as cures for brain rot. Substack appeals to raya because a reader can finish one essay and leave without passing through a chain of advertisements and flashing prompts. YouTube is also drawing people towards longer videos and deep dives that hold one subject for half an hour or more. The video mentions YouTube’s growing television viewership, although it gives no source or figure for the claim. Reading paperback books offers an even sharper change of pace because the reader stays with one physical object for hours.

Physical ownership carries the same desire. One clip shows a woman buying every season of Gilmore Girls from a marketplace for $30, the price of one month of Netflix, then cancelling the subscription so she can keep the shows she watches for comfort. Raya expects CDs, magazines, newsletters, and other physical media to return as people tire of subscriptions and discover that access does not mean ownership.

The list continues through Nokia’s simpler phones and hobbies such as crocheting, jewellery making, ceramics, and painting. Raya understands the attraction as a wish to make something physical with the time and energy that technology absorbs. She also sees the built-in contradiction. People film themselves reading and crocheting, then post the activity as evidence of being offline. She is recording a YouTube video about logging off. The performance still matters because the trend points to genuine disillusionment, even when the platform packages the disillusionment for display.

Running clubs, book clubs, and other social groups offer a more useful role for technology. Social media can help people find the event that gets them away from the screen. Raya mentions The Offline Club, which organises cafe gatherings and phone-free dinners with strangers in European cities. Its co-founders describe a desire to meet people beyond algorithmic feeds and social bubbles. The linked club now presents events, retreats, and city chapters as ways to exchange screen time for real time. Technology remains in the chain, although it serves the meeting rather than replacing it.

The most extreme version of the trend is quitting altogether. Raya plays testimonials from people who have spent six months or four years away from social media. One says that being out of sight means being out of mind, so people quickly forget someone who disappears. Another says that quitting created room for an authentic self, new hobbies, books, and thoughts that were not borrowed from consumer trends. A further testimonial describes comparison as a natural human habit that becomes distorted when a person receives a window into millions of lives every day. Returning to TikTok brought that comparison back.

The linked essay “Privacy Is Sexy” makes a related point through a month without social media during a honeymoon in Mexico. Its author stops caring as much about clothes because an invisible audience has gone. She takes fewer photographs for publication, notices the difference between keeping a memory and preparing a post, and describes ordinary moments that remain private. The experience changes the purpose of the phone. A camera can record a life for the person living it, while a feed asks the person to stage that life for other people.

The people who cannot disappear

Raya pauses the testimonials to draw a limit around them. Some people struggle with compulsive checking, endless scrolling, and broken concentration. For someone who does not depend on the apps and feels calm without them, quitting may be a manageable choice. A large part of the audience faces a different condition because the internet has become part of the infrastructure of daily life.

Amazon is one example. A boycott sounds simple until a person has family responsibilities, a career, and errands, then discovers that the alternative requires extra time and travel. Facebook is another. Raya dislikes the platform’s AI-generated rubbish, although people still use it to sell furniture, rent flats, find local services, announce university events, and organise city activities. Someone trying to sell an old IKEA mirror may need the platform because the practical network exists there.

Work adds a harder constraint. People stay online for networking and visibility, whilst employers and recruiters expect a LinkedIn profile, regular posts, at least 500 connections, and a personal brand. Raya mocks the resulting culture through posts that turn a proposal, a divorce, a birth, or the completion of a beer into a lesson about B2B sales. The joke exposes the cost of constant availability: private events become material for professional proof.

Artists, small businesses, freelancers, and content creators face the same pressure. An interior designer, wedding photographer, or docker can be more likely to get hired when a polished public profile makes the work legible. Authors now carry more of their own marketing burden because BookTok can affect book sales. Publishers expect writers to record videos with trending audio, communicate with readers, and build an online persona, even though those tasks have little to do with writing the book.

The question therefore becomes material. Who can stop hustling for attention, and who needs visibility to pay rent? Almost everyone can get online now, so the internet has become a basic utility in much of the West. Raya quotes the linked Digital 2024: Global Overview Report for a worldwide average of 6 hours and 40 minutes online each day and says that roughly two-thirds of the world’s population has internet access. DataReportal supports those global figures, reporting 6 hours and 40 minutes for the typical internet user and more than 66 percent of the world online at the start of 2024. The video’s further figures, including 7 hours and 4 minutes for the United States and 18 adult years spent online, remain claims from the video because the linked sources do not establish those exact numbers.

Raya argues that the expansion of access also expands the supply of data and revenue for technology companies. That interpretation belongs to the video rather than to the DataReportal report, which describes usage and adoption. Once connection becomes ordinary, disconnection can carry the status that connection used to carry.

Time and privacy as status

Raya compares this change with the way wealthy people move away from a style once it becomes available to everyone else. When injectables became common, the ultra-rich turned towards natural beauty and a cleaner look. Time, privacy, and digital absence now work as similar signals. The tradwife aesthetic, slow living, and the movement from money as status towards time as status all make spare capacity visible.

Nara Smith spending seven hours making fresh pasta becomes the clearest example. The act is presented as a cute TikTok, yet it also displays time, freedom, and resources that most people lack. Being offline carries the same implication. A person who can disappear from the feed may have a career that does not depend on constant self-promotion, clients who arrive without daily posting, and enough money to skip the cheapest online marketplace.

Raya points to Silicon Valley executives who keep their children away from the platforms they helped build, alongside celebrities whose assistants manage their accounts. The people in the inserted clip say they avoid social media whilst staying informed through other means. Their ability to delegate, filter, or hire support gives them a form of distance that a regular worker has to create alone, if they can create it at all.

Selling the feeling of escape

Raya’s own position remains practical. She is using YouTube and does not treat technology as the source of every problem. Timers, app lockers, greyscale mode, and leaving the phone in another room can change a person’s habits without requiring a move to the woods. The larger risk is that brands will monetise the desire for a quieter life before anyone changes the systems that produce the exhaustion.

Unplugged supplies the example. The company offers 30 log cabins in the UK, each with a box for the phone, books, board games, a cassette player, an Instax camera, a local map, a kitchen, showers, and indoor and outdoor fires. Guests stay for at least three nights, with the video quoting a price of about €700. Raya accepts that a pleasant cabin might cost a similar amount on another listing. The interesting part is the framing. The customer pays for the cabin and for the meaning attached to it: nature, silence, escape, and the luxury of being unreachable.

The same message appears in TikToks filmed in beautiful beaches, islands, and mountains with “offline is the new luxury” overlaid on the image. A person who can reach those places has already solved much of the problem that the video presents. Many people remain online because they use the feed as an escape from lives that leave little room for rest. Selling them a branded version of disconnection leaves the conditions of that life untouched.

Raya names this pattern as wellness capitalism. Slowness, silence, rest, nature, and boredom become ordinary needs described through specialised language that makes them sound like products. A walk becomes forest bathing. Turning off a phone becomes dopamine fasting. Retreats and cabins show how hard it has become for many people to unplug without paying for a setting that gives the act a name and a price.

There is nothing wrong with paying for a cabin when the money is available. Raya would book one herself. The useful caution concerns what the marketing sells alongside rest: luxury, exclusivity, and distance from ordinary life. Most people can still walk in a local park, leave the phone behind for a few hours, or spend time with another person without turning the act into an aesthetic. The video ends there, without a formal conclusion. Its answer to the opening question is a condition: everyone may want to log off, while the freedom to do so remains unevenly distributed.

Further reading / references

• Digital 2024: Global Overview Report, DataReportal.
• Alarming Average Screen Time Statistics, Exploding Topics.
• privacy is sexy, HOTGIRLHEALTHCLUB.
• The Latest Millennial Staple to Become Uncool? Being Online, Newsweek.
• The Offline Club, offline community and events.
• Here’s why going OFFLINE is the next big thing, Opal - The Focus Company.
• Why being offline is the latest status symbol, Wildish & Co.