The "IRL Renaissance" Is a Luxury Belief
The "IRL renaissance" is a luxury belief held by a small, privileged class of knowledge workers who mistake their own burnout for a societal shift.
If you read enough Substack or spend enough time on Twitter, you'd think we're on the brink of a great return to physical life. Feeds are dead. Serious people are logging off. Salons, popup cities, and in‑person gatherings are where culture is supposedly moving next.
This prediction shows up over and over again among the Interneterati: the idea that online life has exhausted itself, and that real value is migrating back to rooms, dinners, and embodied presence.
It sounds plausible. It's also not grounded in reality.
The Behavioral Evidence
The simplest way to test the thesis is behavioral. If people were genuinely moving offline at scale, the most basic metric on earth--time spent online--would be falling.
It isn't.
Globally, daily internet usage has resumed its climb after a brief post‑pandemic normalization dip. The average person now spends more than seven hours per day online. In the U.S., it's higher. Among Gen Z, it's dramatically higher--with 63% of millennials reporting they spend more time online than offline. Screen time isn't retreating; it's consolidating.
What has changed is not the amount of time spent online, but where that time goes. Public posting feels quieter, which creates the illusion of an exodus. In reality, attention has shifted toward short‑form video, streaming, gaming, and private messaging. TikTok users now average 95 minutes per day on the platform--more than Instagram (62 min), YouTube (49 min), and Facebook (31 min) combined. The internet hasn't emptied out--it has fragmented.
This is where the Substack narrative goes wrong. Writers mistake a change in visibility for a change in behavior. Feeds feel stale, so they infer that people have gone outside. But quieter feeds don't mean empty screens. They mean people have moved into smaller, denser digital rooms--private group chats, algorithmic video feeds, and encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, which now handles 150 billion messages daily.
Digital detox culture reinforces the illusion. Many knowledge workers are genuinely burned out by constant exposure, and some successfully reallocate their time toward curated offline experiences. But at scale, detox fails. A survey of 3,000 Americans found that 72% fail to complete their digital detox attempts, with 51% relapsing within just two days. In the UK, 60% of adults report never having taken a digital detox at all, and 45% say they couldn't last 12 hours offline. Burnout is real; migration is not.
If an IRL renaissance were truly underway, the offline economy would reflect it. Instead, live events have stabilized after a post‑COVID surge, with growth concentrated almost entirely at the top. Mega‑tours thrive. Mid‑tier touring struggles. Festival cancellations normalize--2025 saw record cancellations including Pitchfork, Balaton Sound, and Sick New World, as infrastructure costs rose 30-50% while sponsorship dollars evaporated. This is not what a mass return to physical culture looks like.
The Bubble Effect
So why does the prediction persist?
Because it's coming from a narrow, highly networked class whose experiences are overrepresented online. When a few hundred people circulate through the same salons, dinners, and popup gatherings--and all talk about it publicly--it feels like a movement. Outside that bubble, behavior looks very different.
Calling the IRL renaissance a "luxury belief" isn't an insult; it's a description. It's a belief that signals taste, discernment, and intentionality without imposing systemic cost on the believer. For people with flexible schedules, disposable income, and dense professional networks, going offline sometimes is feasible. For everyone else, digital life remains the default substrate.
The more accurate framing is bifurcation, not renaissance. A small cohort experiments with analog reallocation while the broader population continues drifting deeper into digitally mediated life--less publicly, more privately, and more algorithmically.
The internet didn't die. It just stopped feeling like a town square.
And mistaking that feeling for a societal shift is how the Interneterati keep predicting an IRL future that never quite arrives.
