Being chronically online in the AI slopland was, and feels, terrible. This feeling led some self-aware people to look for offline activities to occupy them, to get off their phones, and decrease their screen time. Hobbies, crafts, journaling, coloring, and reading were suddenly popular again. Content about the same topics exploded in numbers too, and they're getting a lot of views. So were people offline or was this just another online trend everyone felt like they needed to perform?

I've seen content from people who’ve tried using multiple devices in lieu of their phones. They assess what they mostly use their phones for, then identify if there were single-function devices that can do the same thing (which were usually older devices), just so they don’t have easy access to the internet all the time. They would use digital cameras, pocket notebooks, dumb phones, game emulators, iPods, and many others. The pattern across all this content was that people would use these devices for a trial period, and lock their phones away in the process. They would then record their experiences and challenges in not having a smartphone in this day and age as they go on with their daily lives. At the end of the experiment, they would have an epiphany about how they were spending their entire lives on their phones, how uncomfortable the world was without the internet, and how expensive the cost of convenience was, but it's too comfortable to look away. In conclusion, experiences like these were better off shelved as a social experiment, the feeling of dipping your toes in the water, or just another social commentary online. They’d then go back with zero to minimal changes in their current lifestyle.

My question was: if people were offline, with their phones peacefully tucked away, truly preoccupied with their blind box collection, their diamond art, their to-be-read books, their bag full of supplies for their journals and coloring books with expensive pens, why do we see a lot of videos and photos of them online? Here I was believing that they were doing a detox and yet, throughout the entire experience, the presence of “onlineness” still loomed over. This made it feel like this was just another microtrend. It felt like the next thing people wanted to perform so they can cash in that external validation and belongingness, soothing that FOMO, that ad revenue, sales from an online store, or affiliate marketing.

This is all, and still is, consumption masquerading as a collective good.

If we’re going to be honest and true about digital detox, it means going cold turkey. It meant going off-grid from the internet. It can be a bit extreme. But a modest digital detox with offline preoccupations can work without consumption. It can be done by repairing single-use devices you already have lying around or borrowing from friends and family before buying second-hand. It was doing crafts not for the sake of content, but for achieving a calm and regulated mind. Scrap the idea of sharing it online once you decide to “detox”. Better yet, connect with people who do the same things you like doing or were interested in doing, in person.

I feel like it’s not the digital world that we’re sick of. Maybe, it’s capitalism. But that’s an entire essay on its own.

You don't have to go cold turkey. The reality is it's not easy to navigate the current world when we've all gone through a pandemic where everything has to be online for us to have a semblance of a working society. Most of the facilities post-pandemic were now screen-based and internet-based. It's a lot harder to quit a life online when you were born with the internet already in place and screens were just like any other things you see around. Some of the older folks and those who lived in the global south, who, due to their political climate, lag behind the waves of technology, can go offline more easily and for longer periods. But if you truly believe that you cannot live without the internet to express yourself but the platforms makes you feel like shit, I present to you, personal websites. It's a place made absolutely for you, without the unhealthy pervasive rage algorithm and mind-numbing endless scroll. It's your online real estate that was only limited by your creativity and your determination to learn a web programming language.

If you're doing a digital detox, there should be no digital footprint of you doing it. It's a detox, it's supposed to be a period where you're offline, away from your phone. What was it doing existing online?

I mean, you can always go outside and leave your phone at home.

Digital Detox and Consumption: Why Was It Online Then?

7/7/2025