It's time to go offline

Peonies at the New York Botanical Garden.

Over the past year, we all became Extremely Online. As lockdowns proliferated and in-person gatherings became unsafe, every part of our lives became mediated by screens. We all began spending so much more time scrolling through social media. We were cooped up at home, bored, all of our usual options for activities now deemed too risky. Instead, we spent all of our newfound free time on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I’ve written before about how social media discourse during the past year increasingly felt more and more deranged; it became a place where bored people stuck in their homes yelled at each other, got outraged about totally innocuous things (remember Bean Dad?), and publicly shamed people for perceived violations of pandemic restrictions. Every day there was a new backlash to someone’s bad opinion or bad tweet. Posting anything requires a series of mental gymnastics as you try to figure out: would someone get mad at me for this?

Part of the reason online discourse became so bad in the past year was because we simply had nothing else to do. We were trapped in an endless state of quarantine, and so we spent all those extra hours doomscrolling through our social media feeds, finding things to be mad about.

But now that some semblance of normalcy is coming back, we have choices again. Over half of Americans have gotten at least one dose of a Covid vaccine. It’s warm out in most parts of the country, warm enough for outdoor gatherings where risk of transmission is already low. We can choose how we spend our free time — and we don’t have to spend it all online.

In a great piece in The Atlantic this week, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes about how Americans might be spending a lot less time online this summer:

Now, as the stress of the pandemic is beginning to recede, our relationship with the internet might be renegotiated. President Joe Biden has promised to deliver so much progress against the coronavirus that by July 4, “Americans will have taken a serious step toward a return to normal.” The word normal seems to describe parties and sporting events and cross-generational hugs—but a step toward these implies a step away from where we’ve lived since last year’s awful spring. Airline travel is already coming back; could airplane mode be next? As vaccination rates tick up, and IRL social life resumes, it’s getting easier to imagine that we’re on the brink of something big: a coordinated withdrawal from swiping and streaming, a new consensus that staying home to watch Netflix is no longer a chill Friday-night plan, but an affront.

Could this be real? Are we about to start the summer of a Great Offlining in America?

And in his newsletter On Posting, Luke Winkie wrote about our impending offline summer:

It's right around the corner. I'm telling you. 2021 is a rare opportunity to regress; to fully relish the many brain cells that have vanished throughout the trauma of the Covid era. We will once again cultivate benign Instagram feeds filled exclusively with images of dainty noodle bowls. Vacation photos will provoke high-engagement and soft envy as God intended, rather than long comment threads debating viral incubation periods. The boys will take group-selfies on rooftops — wayfarers on, arms over shoulders — positively captioned with some bullshit like "#SQUAD."

This summer presents is a great opportunity for us all to get offline. Every one of us could benefit from spending less time on social media and more time enjoying the outdoors, visiting loved ones we haven’t seen in months, going to restaurants and parks and museums and all the things we couldn’t do safely for the past year and change. We no longer have to spend our free time Being Mad Online. We don’t have to be online at all.

Go enjoy your almost-normal, almost-post-pandemic summer, offline.

Good things to read

America offline, The Atlantic.

How did we get so stuck on here? New York Times.

Travel influencers used to have the dream job. Where will they go next? Refinery29.

Where would food be without Padma Lakshmi? The Cut.

The millennial vernacular of fatphobia, Culture Study.

The pandemic created a childcare crisis. Mothers bore the burden, New York Times.

It’s time for a summer slowdown, Galaxy Brain.

Burnout: modern affliction or human condition? The New Yorker.

The year that TV saved us, Rolling Stone.

---

Thanks for reading! If you like this newsletter, you can click the “heart” at the top of this post on Substack or share it on social media or forward to a friend — they can subscribe at nishachittal.substack.com. You can also leave a comment on this post to tell me what you think! And you can follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here.