is performative offline the new performative online?

+ other predictions for 2026

The GOAT Chris Gayomali asked me to make some 2026 predictions for SSENSE. I had several, but one in particular floated to the surface.

I speculated that next year, people will move more stealthily online, sharing less on purpose, for a few reasons. (The whole piece is worth reading — the other answers included slop fatigue, mindless scrolling will be seen as gross as mindless vaping, the return of the skinny jean.)

But back to performative offlineness! Dude, it’s such a flex to have an IG account with just a handful of photographs. Add in zero stories? I’m wet. A minimalist grid that looks current AND quiet is god-tier levels of cool. While bopping around during the holiday season, I met several people who weren’t on Instagram at all. (TikTok, another story.) But it sounded so baller to me. It sounded like a kind of freedom.

Maybe we’re finally reaching a cultural point where we recognize the grip these services have on us and the damage that grip has done.

For the last twenty+ years, we’ve been goaded and trained to share every single aspect of our lives, and to what end? I do think the pandemic shifted how many people operated online. There was that moment of public shaming around traveling/partying/socializing despite lockdown, so many people I know pulled back their own disclosures, which seems to have continued. That was the first iteration of going dark full-time, leaning into time-shifting and stealth mode on social. But now, I think some of us are finally really reckoning with the way social media has glitched our ability to look, and the way the gaze got co-opted into always skimming the world for perfect tweets, posts, reels, TikToks, and so on. Tech companies are optimizing for our attention (along with our sleep and our time) as their growth markets, and they’re very good at it.

As a result, we’ve reached the logical endpoint of a dystopic reality that has been coalescing for several years (decades?). Being too honest/real online has severe consequences, including restricting travel and arrest. Trust is eroding overall. The social contract is gone. Infrastructure is deteriorating, if not gone completely. Have you recently tried to reach an actual customer service rep at FedEx? JetBlue? Vanguard? Or been to an emergency room lately? It’s terrifying and all connected. The depersonalizaion of the world feels normal when our intimate lives have become depersonalized, too, which has happened by allowing our avatars to stand in as a proxy for entire personalities and lives.

A few summers ago, my magazine editor asked me to write a piece about the perceived stagnation of culture. A high-profile arts writer wanted to proclaim that it was completely dead; I wanted to counter that often, what seems inert is simply hibernating.

I proposed an essay based on the idea of the cultural moment as groundcover, the filler plants you grow in empty patches of soil. They’re deceptively boring; all the action is happening under wraps, in secret, covertly strengthening the soil while protecting it from erosion. My thesis was that this might be the most fecund and generative epoch in centuries, but it’s too early to see it yet. Even during a time of information overload, it’s entirely possible that all has not yet been revealed.

examples of groundcover. its all around!

The piece wasn’t greenlit so I never got the time to delve into my research and theories, but the ideas have stuck with me, and bits bubble out from time to time, including in this prediction that Chris asked me to make. I tapped it out so fast on my Notes app that I didn’t realize it was related until I saw it in print.

I worry that performative offlineness sounds like a cynical dig — like I’m suggesting the impulse to refrain from posting will be as inauthentic as sometimes being compulsively online can be. But I was actually imagining something more conscious and iron-willed than a planned break, something more tactical. Strategic. Refusing to be tracked; refusing to be known, refusing to let our nervous systems get hijacked. Refusing to give all our shit up to AI, and refusing to succumb to the way social media has become a stand-in for reality, even though we all know firsthand how much we manipulate that same reality ourselves.

Truthfully, I was putting a wish out into the world for myself.

My biggest struggle of the past year was with social media — specifically Instagram. Twitter losing its cultural currency was the best thing to ever happen to my thinking and writing career, and my relationship to TikTok is unhealthy in a different way, but Instagram is such a particular beast where the battle between performance and perception is fought daily. As I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before, I’m dealing with a lot of health issues that keep me at home, often isolated for long stretches of time. When I feel well, all I want to do is enjoy life, which often ends up online. When I feel good, I want to share about that good-feeling and reinforce my sensation of aliveness with the dopamine hits of other people witnessing it and affirming it alongside me. When I feel bad, my natural instinct is to put the phone away. For the most part, I happen to look remarkably healthy — glowing, some have said — which creates a cognitive dissonance everywhere between how I look and how I actually am.

Occasionally, I’ll even feel guilty for sharing these partial truths on Instagram, although I suspect that’s what we’re all doing, all the time — image farming a version of ourselves that matches the person we hope to be. As flawed as this practice is, it helps me feel more connected, safe, relevant, less alone. But it has led to the perception, even among those who know what’s happening at a deeper level, that I’m actually fine, so much so that I’ve begun to contemplate revealing more than I’m comfortable with publicly to correct the record.

Thank goodness I haven’t. Lately, I’ve had the clarity that capitulating to the idea that social media is the place where I will be fully witnessed and seen is playing exactly into the same brain scatter that pushes us to overshare, unleash Twitter trigger fingers, and purchase items we don’t even want. That’s not to say I won’t someday talk about what’s going on — in fact, I hope to — but it’ll be on my terms and conditions, with full preparedness for the vulnerability it requires and the kinds of projections that will happen then, too.

For now, I long to be less legible. To live in a world that’s less ableist and easier to navigate, and I don’t have to rely heavily on social media for connection. To be messier, less annoyed by other people’s poor reading comprehension. I long to continue to choose real contact with the world and people, as Shira recently wrote so beautifully about, which also means being willing to get into the muck with myself and others. Which is fucking hard! It’s clumsy and that clumsiness has real consequences. But even to try gives me respair, a word that appears in the title of the new Jesamyn Ward collection out next year. It means the return of hope after a period of despair, and I’m claiming it for 2026.

As always, these are just a constellation of thoughts from my brain to yours. If this resonated with you (or not!), I hope you’ll let me know in the comments below.

some personal service announcements

A dear friend of mine from high school needs a liver transplant, so if you have ever been interested in exploring anonymous organ donation, please consider spending some time at the University Health Transplant Institute site or getting evaluated to see if you’re a match for someone in need.

I am still looking for a studio space in New York to write, make art and give the occasional reiki treatment. If you have any leads, please reply to this email or DM me.

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Thank you for reading. Till soon