The Joy of Being (Offline)
A photo essay by Rosa Alemán
The start of 2026 has, so far, felt like turtle-walking through the wilderness.
It happened on a Tuesday. I was halfway through an article I’ll never finish, task tabs open on my tablet like small ambitions I didn’t actually want. The light outside had the gray blur of late afternoon, and my phone, ever eager for attention, was buried under a pile of scarves, likely pinging in my absence.
It dawned on me mid-January, after weeks of quiet, that I’d posted almost nothing all month. No stories. No updates. Just a single street portrait of comedian Seaton Smith on his way to a late-night gig in New York City.
I hadn’t vanished exactly. I had simply gone offline. A sabbatical of sorts.
I let the spotlight pass over the final weeks of 2025, and in the dimness of December, I found something peace-like.
The first few days unraveled like a ball of yarn. The quiet crisis of observing something you can’t yet articulate. I’d catch myself mid-thought, composing sentences like rebuttals. I’d take a picture and pause, wondering what LUTs I might use to tell the full, gritty story, before deleting it entirely. There was a muscle memory to performance I hadn’t noticed—until I stopped.
The days between early December and late January stretched, and I stretched with them.
In the quiet that followed, I practiced slow Tai Chi in the living room. I baked lopsided butter-pecan cakes in the air fryer. I read and reread Zadie Smith’s essay collection Dead and Alive because it felt like drinking fresh water from a familiar well. I walked without tracking steps, free of apps siphoning data. I passed strangers without the impulse to document anything. Not every moment was luminous. But many were tender.
There’s a phrase I’ve been using as an inside joke with the quietest part of myself. I tell myself, half in jest, today, we’re giving background character peace. It’s the opposite of main character energy, the performative self-importance we’re taught to cultivate. Background character peace is a return to what we’re told is boring. A rebellion against the optimized self, the hyper-legible avatar always broadcasting. In that quieter register, I’ve grown closer to the still-small voice in me, untagged, unseen, and unaccounted for in the feeds.
We’re told our worth lies in visibility. Be seen to matter. Be known to exist. We turn our personal lives into content that feeds the always-on, resource-hungry infinity machine. Our dreams become deliverables. Even our rest becomes performative, reduced to spa day selfies, productivity detox captions, and clever nods to burnout. But the spotlight is hot and harsh. It flattens. It edits out the good mess, the in-progress joy, the hobby you love but aren’t good at yet, and may never be. It obscures the daily life that is deeply boring, deeply tender, and fully your own.
So lately, I’ve been opting out. Gently. Intentionally. Like closing a door without slamming it. Like placing a “do not disturb” sign on my inner life.
Sometimes, when the world begs for attention, the most transformative thing you can do is nothing at all.
Power off. No algorithms. No audience. No performance.
Just existing. Humming with the trees. Making up names for the birds braving winter in their frozen nests. Painting with colors I haven’t yet figured out how to blend, creating textured abstractions of nature’s rhythm and my own fumbling joy. Lighting my sister’s candle and sitting quietly on the couch as snow feathers down on everything.
Sometimes, in the full light of day, I dance. Not the choreographed TikTok kind. The ridiculous, no-witness kind. The kind you do when your body remembers what pure joy feels like, unleashed.
These small, sacred acts don’t need to be posted to be real. They don’t need to be perfect to matter. They just need to be lived.
Life isn’t a brand. It isn’t a storyline. It’s messy. Painful. Contradictory. Half-finished. And the real stuff—the stuff that nourishes, shapes, and roots us—happens offline.
No one watching.
Nothing to prove.
Just here—
quietly alive in the joy of being
offline.
