The "offline" fantasy is a lie

Why biology - not addiction - keeps us scrolling, and how we evolve in 2026.

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This is the first part of a series speaking to my personal marketing and human behavior predictions for 2026, so if you want to see the subsequent posts, make sure you’re subscribed!

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Everyone talks a big game about quitting. Deleting Instagram, buying flip phones, and moving to a cabin to touch grass.

But if that’s true, then why did global time spent on social hit record highs recently?

Are people actually leaving, or are they just making performative announcements? And why are people talking about quitting on social media ON social media? Does that seem weird to you?

Since I’m an annoying marketer, I’ll admit that we’re trained to watch what people do, not what they say. And when you layer biology on top of that, these behaviors make perfect sense.

Humans aren’t (intentional) hypocrites, we’re just animals following our programming.

Understanding this is key to grasping why the offline fantasy is just that - a fantasy, and what we can learn to do instead.

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The endless dopamine trap

Humans don’t just like novelty - we’re completely addicted to the anticipation of it.

Neuroscience distinguishes between “liking” (pleasure) and “wanting” (drive). Dopamine controls the wanting, the chemical of the chase.

And research on reward shows that dopamine spikes when we anticipate a reward, not when we get it.

Once something becomes familiar, our dopamine drops. Your romantic partner becomes predictable. That one viral video you watched 5x suddenly gets buried in your saves.

Naval Ravikant nails this in The Almanack. You fantasize about a new car and the desire consumes you, until you acquire it - then the desire starts to flatline.

Whether it’s a new car or a TikTok feed, we’re conditioned to keep hunting for the possibility of satisfaction, not the satisfaction itself.

Why humans romanticize the “before times”

When the chase for a better future state gets exhausting (like all of 2025), we switch directions and pine for the past.

We look back to decades like the 90s - suburban neighborhoods, bikes on lawns, zero digital notifications, and think “wow, those were the days.”

We numb out, rewatching idyllic rom coms, and chase the aesthetics of a digital-less decade.

But this is a mindfuck, because we want the feeling of a slower life, but we aren’t willing to give up our access of a fast one.

I notice this especially with the migration to Substack. We say we crave something “slower”, but the homepage feed instills the same fast paced social media dynamics, just on a different platform.

Another example is the resurgence of digital cameras. Gen Z buying Canon PowerShots isn’t a rejection of digital life, it’s just tactile novelty. It’s their way of getting a fresh dopamine hit from an old format, a simple vibe shift. Nothing more.

Digital is now just the baseline

So time travel isn’t an option. The neural pathways for modern digital reward are already built. Unless we all collectively agree to smash our phones, or there’s some kind of international no-screen mandate, the digital thread is permanent.

But because we’re status-seeking monkeys, even if our behaviors make us do one thing, we’ll still try to flip the script.

Which is where signaling theory comes into play.

If everyone is online, then being online has zero status value. The new luxury becomes disconnection. It signals “I’m so rich in real world community that I actually don’t need the internet.”

But here’s the irony: a signal only works if the tribe sees it.

Take the recent phoneless party in LA that spread across social media. Did people attend and then disappear? No, quite the opposite. They went, and then immediately logged onto social to post the evidence.

Party-goers were foraging for social proof to show they were “better” than the digital masses, all while using the exact tools they tried to leave behind.

(This isn’t a knock on the party, I actually think it’s what we’ll see more of, which I’ll touch on later.)

Why we can’t just “log off”

So if we can’t really leave, and we can’t just smash our phones…why is all of this so hard?

The answer comes down to simple energy conservation.

Social baseline theory is something I discuss often with my students. It suggests that the human brain expects access to social relationships to regulate metabolic energy.

This means if you’re alone, your brain is on high alert, scanning for threats.

But in a group? You offload vigilance to the tribe (i.e. safety in numbers.)

COVID stripped our physical third spaces, sending our brains into a panic. Going online was really the path of least resistance to lower that stress.

We didn’t migrate to digital communities because we were addicted to screens. We did it because our brains are just addicted to safety.

Migrating to niche, algorithmic micro-communities is simply our brain’s way of trying to find a home amidst a city of chaos.

The toxicity paradox

Just because these behaviors are “natural” doesn’t mean they’re healthy.

Remember, we’re biologically wired to crave sugar and fat because calories used to be scarce. Now, we have grocery stores. We’re biologically wired to crave social information. Now, we have algorithms.

Social media is just the processed food of connection.

It mimics the thing we need (social proximity) but strips out the nutrients (eye contact, touch, vulnerability) and pumps it full of additives (comparison, polarization, etc.)

So we get stuck in a cruel loop:

1. We feel anxious and alone

2. We log on to find the tribe, or a tribe

3. We encounter toxicity/comparison

4. We scroll more to find the relief we missed

When I say we “can’t just leave” I’m not saying that social media is a utopia, or defending it in any way.

I’m saying that it’s a super normal stimulus for us - a biological trap that’s difficult to escape, as it mimics the exact thing we need to survive.

Understanding the impulse

Humans aren’t doomed to be depressed scrollers. We just need to stop shaming ourselves for the impulse to connect.

If you go on a digital detox and fail, it’s not because you’re weak. You’re literally just fighting against millions of years of evolution.

Demonizing or trying to burn down the digital house isn’t a solution. Trying to play the game of “I’m not like other social media users” won’t get you very far.

But if the digital space is like a new house, we probably need to stop leaving the front door open.

We don’t need to ditch our screens to find intention, we just need to build intention into our pre-existing digital life.

The evolution of belonging in 2026

As a marketer I have little interest in becoming another dopamine drug dealer.

It’s our duty as brand gatekeepers to stop building for extraction (throttling attention at all costs) and start focusing on nutrition (trying to feed the human need for safety and connection).

So if 2025 was about the need for a digital detox, then 2026 will be the start of our digital flourishing, a more recently studied phenomena.

The vernacular I’ve used around this is called slow marketing (which I’ll be weaving into future posts) which honors the need for balance instead of exploiting addiction.

To foster true belonging next year, smart marketers should understand the following:

Belonging requires barriers

In the era of mass social media, everyone was invited. But as we’ve discussed, psychology says that if everyone is in, nobody feels special.

So we’ll start to see a shift from broad, open-access engagement toward gated intimacy.

This isn’t some kind of exclusivity play - think of it more like building a sub-culture. A vibe wall vs. a paywall.

Substack’s private chat communities do just this, where the price of admission is shared values or specific knowledge. The real measure of success here is not followers, but the density of your private group chats.

Belonging requires contribution

We’ve been marketing to audiences as if they’re passive consumers. But people don’t want to be passive, they want to contribute.

Smart brands will stop focusing so much on creating content for people to consume, and put more energy toward creating contexts for people to contribute.

This means giving your community a job, as belonging is forged through shared effort. Think of co-creating and launching a product with your community, for example. People want to feel like they’re able to build the house with you.

Belonging requires safety

Re: social baseline theory, the brain seeks community to lower its stress. Most modern marketing does the opposite, though - it uses FOMO, urgency, and anxiety to drive attention.

(This is why I’ve talked about there being a shift from the attention economy to a trust economy earlier this year…)

Your goal now is to become a regulator, not a disrupter.

If the rest of the internet feels like a high cortisol threat, you should be the much needed exhale. Belonging in 2026 is reserved for the marketers and brands who can make people feel safe.

This means focusing on consistency instead of virality, as well as distinct, predictable rituals that ground people amidst a chaotic year.

The bottom line

We can’t rewire millions of years of biology. Humans will always seek out dopamine, their tribe, and hierarchies for belonging.

The marketers who succeed in 2026 won’t be the ones encouraging or participating in the doomscrolling or ragebaiting (thank god..)

Instead, they’ll be the ones creating rooms where people feel calm.

And doesn’t that sound actually…really nice?

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Let me know in the comments:

Have you been able to successfully go offline…ever?

What frustrates you the most about your phone and/or screentime?

Is there ever an option for more intentionality?

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