I'm thinking about getting offline

It's early but it's undeniable.

As life, we are capable of creating conditions conducive to life. This is our true and proper work.  — Daniel Christian Wahl

In the early months of bringing the podcast through, my decision to call it Offline was informed by the desire to explore who we are when we’re not packaging up our existence into a neat and tidy niche and selling it online via social media platforms like Instagram.

I wanted to create a safe space for the country’s most talked about fashion, beauty and lifestyle influencers to talk about who they really are when they’re offline. I’d gotten to know many of them on a personal level when I was working in women’s media and so I knew just how completely and utterly normal they all were and that they weren’t magically exempt from textured experiences or painful storylines just because they had 500k followers on Instagram.

We’d cry together at PR lunches over things like fertility challenges, breast cancer scares, pregnancy loss, chronic illness, money worries or breakups, and then later that night we’d all post pictures of us all smiling and posing perfectly at the event. Reflecting on this now, it’s giving deranged.

But you see back then, influencer culture was very different. The way to cultivate a following was to post polished, curated, filtered, aspirational content. Strictly no talking and definitely no crying or over-sharing. Cringe.

So it wasn’t that influencers were withholding or faking, it was that their personal stories weren’t part of the job description. Their pain wasn’t required. No one wanted it… until they did. Next generation media offerings — including my podcast, Offline — paved the way for a new, more honest style of content and our appetite for authenticity was officially established.

These days, pain and personal stories are the batteries that power the 2025 influencer. The first assignment of today’s chosen ones is to lay down the origin story that will go on to inform their very own lore.

So with this context shared, you can imagine how sort of… fulfilling it was for the people who had followed my guests for years and years to finally hear their voice and learn more about who they were and what life was really like on the other side of the filter. Deservedly, it humanised them and for some, created an entry point to sharing more personal content on their channels.

But seven years later (excuse me, what), the context in which I use the word offline is rapidly evolving. This sounds like a business announcement of some kind but it isn’t. Nothing is changing for Offline but I sense everything is changing for me as it relates to how I show up in and for the business.

In short: I want to get offline.

Ironic is the only word I have for it but it doesn’t really capture how divinely organised this whole thing is. And isn’t it always?

It’s obviously always been leading here. Right? Nature whispered “offline” as I pondered what to call the podcast back in January 2018, and “get offline” when I was extending the brand into mentoring in 2019 and needed a memorable website URL, all with the ultimate intention of me eventually doing that very thing — getting offline — and perhaps inspiring others to do the same.

Or am I overthinking it?

Someone always has to go first and I’ve built a compelling career being an early mover, adopter and believer. I feel it before I can make sense of it and then I can’t forget what I’ve felt — as hard as I try — so I simply have to leap into the unknown without a guidebook.

There’s actually no alternative once I’ve felt the evolution that’s now required and I know this because I’ve tried to ignore it before and it always ends in either intense boredom, regret or destruction. And then I eventually arrive where I was originally meant to be only I’m late and capitalism has already chewed up and spat out the idea, the industry, the platform or the medium.

I love change. I love different. I love exploring newness. I joined Pinterest when you needed an invitation. I joined Twitter around the time it launched. I was scrolling Hipstamatic before Instagram. I leapt over magazines entirely (save for that year I sub-edited a TV guide) into digital media and then self-selected out of that at the height of my publishing career to start a podcast before anyone really knew what a podcast was. I then entered the online course space pre-pandemic before landing where I am today facilitating closed community spaces.

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I’ve been self-taught the entire way because when you’re early, you’re also mostly alone and without a map. I suspect untethering myself from the internet and social media will be the same — lonely, but right.

The only clarity I have is that I’m excessively, undeniably interested in exploring how my life could feel and the impact my work could have if my everyday reality didn’t include plugging myself into the internet. And that’s enough. I’ve learnt this about leaping: If you’ve got the plan you’ve missed the window for evolution.

At the heart of all of this is the realisation that I don’t like consuming social media but I like creating social media. Can I do the latter without the former? Or is that breaking the rules and not how this works?

This untethering is about my taste and personal interests, too. Social media is a cultural sieve and some days I feel like a product of the crumbs. I can see all the ways I’ve tried to fight back, like buying a sketch pad and pencils because I want to learn how to draw my ideas and the concepts I see in my mind but struggle to express with words or through traditional strategic frameworks. The plastic seal remains unbroken.

I bought an online course to learn how to paint abstract art and I’ve never logged in. I want to study Norse mythology to make contact with my Norwegian roots. I found a professor in the UK who teaches it, bought her book, haven’t opened it. I’ve had the The Artist’s Way next to my bed for months with the intention of re-establishing my morning pages practice and weekly artist dates.

I’m even trialing new content on my personal Instagram in an attempt to make the experience of being on there feel like the creative outlet it was originally designed to be.

So it's very clear to me that I have a desire to live a more artistic and interesting life but I’m so excessively online that I don’t have the time or energy to follow through.

These leaps… they always start with questions. Here’s some I’m currently ruminating on while I walk at incline 12 speed 4 on the treadmill because a fitness girlie on TikTok influenced me to:

• Can we be online without being online?

• How important is engaging in real time to the expansion of my reach and resonance?

• What would happen if I unfollowed every account on social media?

• Is that obnoxious?

• What if they unfollow me?

• How would my ideas, creativity, content and offerings come through without the reference point or the trend?

• Am I ever having an original thought?

• In what ways would my business be impacted, if at all?

The prospect of having no social media apps on my phone excites me. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach as I feel into the potential of motherhood, marriage and mentoring without the distraction of a quick scroll or worse, the doomy ones that keep me awake way past my bedtime on occasion.

I actually had to delete the TikTok app from my phone because I became addicted and I realised ingesting hundreds of videos a day about everything from a day in the life of a private chef living in the Hamptons to a ghost captured on a baby monitor to a brand expert dissecting the latest font trend was making me feel... disarranged. The comment culture on that platform is also mostly dark and abusive. If you’re sensitive enough you’ll feel the frequency its operating on and at times I felt like I began vibrating at that frequency when I was scrolling.

TikTok was extinguishing my light, flattening my taste, stealing my time and destabilising my nervous system.

The platform wars are also getting a bit boring, so that’s playing into this desire to depart as well. I've had to care about who is doing what for over 15 years and I’m over it. I think we’re all getting over every platform wanting to be everything. Can’t podcasts just be audio? Can’t Substack just be long-form writing? Can’t Instagram just be pictures? Can’t TikTok just be dancing (again)?

I actually think it’s this constant pursuit of audience share that will drive us off the big platforms and onto our own.

Yes, our own.

The decentralised social media revolution is already here but we’re at the height of our big platform addiction so I suspect it will take a while for enough of us to quit using and switch over which is what will dismantle the current power and control that sits with centralised platforms like X, Meta, YouTube etc.

In the Fediverse (open social web) we can already enjoy social networking without ads, algorithms, privacy breaches, infinite scroll and people selling our data. We can already build a creative, community-led corner of the internet that we own and control but will enough of us actually do it?

When I talk about Offline I say it’s a safe place to land, rest, recover and redefine the role our work plays in the overall storyline of our lives, and the future of social networking will be the same. I sense it’ll be a form of social rehab where we’ll have to learn how to be ourselves again. We’ll have to establish our own taste and interests again because an algorithm has done this for us for longer than we can remember what life was like without being fed.

When will we stop funding these big players with our time, attention and creativity? Because that’s how they’ll crumble and we’ll all get our lives and time back. Protocols over platforms — how the internet was always meant to be. It’s the only way out.

And then, there’s AI. I’m in the early stages of exploring how the creation of an Offline intelligence — a brand and business GPT — could support me to spend less time plugged into the internet and more time serving my community and private clients.

With over 100 episodes of the podcast, nearly a thousand voice mentoring memos on my phone, hundreds of wisdom session replays, a business course, a website built on my words, my ways and my taste, thousands of social media posts and complete clarity about who I serve, how I serve them and when; it’s easy to see how robust and aligned an intelligence pre-trained on my body of work would be.

(Detour: If dead internet theory is true, is this my awakening?)

Enjoying a life lived offline while continuing to create and share meaningful invitations to join me inside closed community spaces.

This is the reality I’m interested in and ready for.

Closed, safe, expansive, intimate spaces sitting should-to-shoulder with people moving through the same process of getting values-aligned in their life and career as I am. And by closed I don’t mean exclusive. Closed means contained. Walls we can rest our backs against and doors we can politely shut.

What’s coming up for you when I say I want to get offline? Are you feeling the pull, too? I’d love to know.

Alison xo