Being offline is the new online trend

Source: Being offline is the new online trend, ash callaghan, 21:16, uploaded 2026-01-11, playlist index 132.

Ash Callaghan opens the year by complaining about a new cultural command: everyone should become “chronically offline”. Flip phones, iPod Nanos, journaling, reading, hobbies, and human connection are presented as the cure for TikTok scrolling, Instagram advertising, and subscription life. Callaghan hears a different diagnosis. The public mood has turned against influencer culture, and the language of offline life has become another way to sell things online.

The misuse of “analog”

The first target is the word itself. Callaghan reads out the technical definition of analog: information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity, such as spatial position or voltage. A flip phone and an iPod Nano may remove social-media apps, yet they still process digital information. A box television, DVD player, or CD player can be physical without being analog. The terms describe different properties.

That distinction matters because “analog” has become a status word. Callaghan sees people attach it to anything that looks old, tangible, or scarce, regardless of the thing’s actual operation. The word travels through the internet by association. Someone who appears cool uses it, and the audience adopts it before checking what it means. In this usage, “analog” means that being online has become embarrassing whilst owning the right objects has become attractive.

Callaghan accepts the practical appeal of a flip phone. A device without social-media apps can make distraction harder. The complaint concerns the label and the performance around it. The person who buys a Cat S22 flip phone, films the purchase in 4K, and uploads the clip to TikTok has created another internet aesthetic. The phone may change a daily habit. The content turns that habit into a product image.

Offline life as influencer content

The contradiction becomes visible in the language of promotion. Influencers invite viewers to spend a day in an “unplugged cabin” that a brand has gifted them for a digital detox, then document how they spend the time. The people whose income depends on being watched tell the audience to stop consuming other people’s lives through a screen.

Callaghan extends “influencer” beyond professional creators to anyone who films themselves for strangers on TikTok. The shared feature is the attempt to reach people outside ordinary life. From that angle, telling an audience to abandon the audience is a poor business model. The contradiction disappears once offline life becomes the subject being sold. A flip-phone video, a digital-minimalism recommendation, or a mountain retreat can all turn withdrawal into a format.

This is why the public-relations team has no reason to intervene. The message still generates attention, and the object being promoted can still be purchased. “Dumb phone” adds another layer of historical confusion. Phones that people used in 2004 were ordinary tools for their time. The newer term makes an old device sound like a lifestyle position.

Callaghan then lists the values attached to the trend: real connection, going outside, opposition to corporations and consumerism. The same feeds that carry those values also carry unboxings of iPod Nanos and declarations that a flip phone is cute because other cool people own one. The aesthetic claims to refuse consumer culture whilst giving consumer culture another set of objects to desire.

Approved and forbidden consumption

The argument shifts from devices to stuff. Callaghan recalls a 2025 consensus that there was too much of it. Shein hauls, collections of Jellycats, gold Labubus, and novelty Starbucks cups were treated as evidence of bad consumerism. Books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, festivals, and box sets of comfort television now receive a warmer reading because they belong to an offline and physical life.

Callaghan separates materialism from consumption. A person can consume an experience such as a festival without accumulating a physical object. The sharper term for collecting objects to signal status is materialism, she suggests. The confusion comes from mixing the economic sense of consumption associated with Marx with the looser cultural use of “consumerism” online. A festival becomes good consumption because it looks analog-core. A Labubu becomes bad consumption because the current internet has decided that it represents excess.

Physical media introduces a second contradiction. People say that a digital purchase gives them a licence rather than ownership, whilst a DVD gives them something they can keep. Callaghan tests the claim with Gilmore Girls. Netflix can remove the show from its catalogue, so she understands why a box set feels more secure. Owning the discs still gives a viewer no rights to the programme itself. The physical object gives control over access to a copy. It does not turn the buyer into the owner of the work.

The distinction then collides with the earlier criticism of accumulation. A person buys a pile of objects, displays them as evidence of taste, and sends them to landfill when their cultural value fades. The same person can describe a Gilmore Girls box set as a responsible return to ownership. Callaghan’s irritation comes from the unstable moral vocabulary. Books are praised as objects to own, whilst the practice that would use fewer objects, such as borrowing from a library, remains invisible because a library card carries less status.

She finds her own library card in Apple Wallet and uses it as the plain alternative. Reading can disappear from the centre of the trend whilst owning books takes its place. A book bought for a shelf because it signals taste still functions as a consumer good. The offline aesthetic has changed the approved object without changing the social work that the object performs.

Ordinary posting and the loss of friends

The video then turns back towards Instagram. Callaghan misses the period when people posted Thanksgiving outfits, Christmas presents, breakfast, or a small walk. She remembers the older WCW and MCM posts as a time when Instagram felt like a place for people one knew, before everyone began performing celebrity.

The current complaint about social media has a more precise shape than a wish to disappear. Professional influencers fill Instagram with paid trips to the Maldives, Amazon storefronts, polished production, and edited video. Their work occupies the feed so thoroughly that friends’ posts become hard to find. Some people stop posting because a photograph from an ordinary life seems unable to compete with professional content.

Callaghan includes a clip from Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer, who describes missing the casual posts that once filled social media: a breakfast photo, a coffee, and other details that carried little public importance. The desire is to see what friends are doing from hour to hour. It is a desire for a social record made by people with whom one has a relationship.

The culture has made that desire awkward. Posting something mundane can feel embarrassing because the public language says that being online is uncool. The same person is asked to delete social media and go hiking in the Dolomites, then shown an Instagram Reel of an influencer being offline in the Dolomites. The recommendation carries its own advertisement.

The class cost of being offline

Callaghan accepts that a chalet in the mountains may be more pleasant than scrolling in bed. She rejects the idea that it offers a general solution. Real people have emails, Zoom calls, and deadlines. A retreat, a cabin designed for digital detox, or the spare time needed to delete every platform belongs to a class of leisure that many people cannot afford.

The offline trend therefore becomes another unattainable internet style. Its audience is asked to admire a life with fewer digital demands by people who can turn those demands off for a weekend, produce a video about the experience, and return to the network with the benefits of the performance. The instruction lands differently on someone who depends on a phone for work, care, transport, or contact with family.

One influencer in the video presents digital minimalism as an intentional way to choose the role digital media plays in life. Callaghan treats this as another form of influencer propaganda. The distinction between anti-technology and a deliberate digital life can be useful, yet the promotional setting changes what the advice can mean. The viewer receives a recommendation to limit media through the same attention economy that the recommendation claims to resist.

Influencer fatigue as the actual complaint

Callaghan uses Emma Chamberlain’s podcast as a second explanation for the mood. Chamberlain describes content creation as exhausting because professional influencers set a standard that ordinary users cannot match. People put effort into posts that reach nobody they intended to reach. Even Chamberlain, whose job depends on publishing, says that documenting everything and maintaining an online personality can become exhausting.

Callaghan answers that the job itself explains Chamberlain’s exhaustion. A professional creator has to keep producing even when the work has become unpleasant. Someone who posts for friends can stop. The ordinary user therefore does not tire from content creation in the same way. They tire because the platform hides the friends they wanted to see behind influencer advertising, brand trips, podcast clips, and other professional material.

The difference appears in the meaning of a small audience. A reel with two views can succeed when those two viewers are the people it was meant for. The same two views feel like failure when strangers find the post whilst the intended friends miss it. The problem is the mismatch between the audience a person wants and the audience the platform supplies.

Chamberlain also suggests that people resent giving content away for free whilst influencers get paid. Callaghan doubts that money explains the ordinary user’s withdrawal. People who enjoy making and sharing things may do it without payment. The stronger reason is that the platform has stopped delivering their work to the people they care about. The influencer mindset measures success by reach, and that measure has spread into a place that used to support small social contact.

Callaghan ends with the comparison that an influencer telling people to go offline resembles a billionaire telling people to give to charity. The advice asks ordinary people to surrender a resource whilst the speaker keeps the power that the resource provides. The video returns to its opening claim: people may still want to be online. They want to see their friends’ breakfast, clothes, and small daily events. The fatigue concerns an online world organised around influencers, and the people who profit from that world have trouble seeing the distinction.

Limits

The video is cultural commentary and satire. It offers no survey, platform data, or independent measure of a 2025 consensus, a 2026 trend, or the size of influencer fatigue. Claims about what “everyone” wants describe the creator’s reading of internet culture.

The technical distinction between analog and digital is used to criticise loose online language, yet the video does not develop the engineering terms beyond the definition it reads aloud. The consumerism discussion is similarly exploratory. It identifies a real tension between access, ownership, material accumulation, and status without resolving the economic and legal questions behind those terms.

The video names Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker column and an Emma Chamberlain podcast discussion, but it gives neither a title nor a URL. Their arguments remain reported examples inside Callaghan’s commentary. The note keeps the claims attached to the video rather than treating them as independently verified evidence.

Further reading / references

• Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker column about the loss of casual, mundane social-media posts. The video does not identify the column’s title or provide a URL.
• Emma Chamberlain, a podcast discussion about exhaustion, professional content, and the changing use of social media. The video does not identify the episode.