The Quiet Collapse of Online Culture: Why Everything Feels Off
- Jesse Jacques
- Jul 21
- 5 min read
No one’s inside, but the branding still beams.
A soft metaphor for the spaces we keep performing into, even when the signal’s left.
Have you noticed lately that just about everything online feels a little off?
Not just the content, but the whole rhythm of it. The tone, the timing, the repetition. Something about the way people are communicating, posting, sharing, and performing all feels like it’s running on fumes. It's not just posts and content, but the people behind them. The energy in their eyes. The way their voices sound. There’s something strained in all of it, like you can see people are just barely holding together this performative act.
There’s a kind of fatigue setting in. Quiet, low-grade, hard to name. But it’s there. Scroll long enough and you’ll feel it. All of a sudden, everyone’s a scholar, a poet, a philosopher, a brand. Everyone’s “making connections, or 'discovering' something. And lately there’s this thing where people act like they’ve just uncovered some lost truth, like they’re the first to ever realize that rest matters. Or that nature is healing. Or that being present is good. I saw a funny TikTok that said content creators are the new Christopher Columbus: showing up like “guys… I just discovered breathing.” And yeah, it’s exactly like that. It’s not even that all the insights are bad; it’s just that we’ve hit this loop where everything sounds like someone rediscovering the obvious… in their brand voice. With a color palette. And a downloadable freebie.
Everyone has a takeaway and some strong rage bait opinion that leads to a sales funnel. But underneath it all, something’s breaking down.
The entire performative ecosystem is quietly collapsing under the weight of its own repetition.
You can see it in language and how they follow the same arc every time. The reflection, the breakthrough, the low point, the rise. The lesson. The offer. The lesson again, slightly reworded. Even the chaos has a certain formatting now.
It’s not just content either; it's behavioral. How many morning routines can we see? How many nothing videos of basic everyday life things need to be curated and filmed? It’s all reflective of a system trying to prop itself up with presence when the substance ran out a while ago.
That kind of schtick worked way longer than it should have, extracting all the life out of any attention it may have garnered briefly. The repackaging of the same emotions, the same “aha” moments, the same soft-spoken wisdom. Turning lived insight into a content product until there was nothing left but robotic motions.
That's why most things online feel weirdly empty. Like we’re all consuming these perfectly styled captions and mini-essays that technically check all the boxes but leave no actual impression. And maybe it’s not just the content that feels empty but the people behind it too. Not who they are, but how they’re showing up. The constant performance. The polished vulnerability. Every voice starts to feel like it’s trying to land something, not say something. It’s all performance and zero resonance. And eventually, it starts to wear you down.
You don’t even realize it at first. You just catch yourself scrolling a little faster. Tuning out a little more. Not engaging with what you’re seeing, even when what you’re looking at is considered “good.”
That’s the fatigue I’m talking about. The lack of aliveness in what you're engaging with.
We’re watching a shift happen in real time. The online ecosystem that rewarded polish, strategy, and optimized vulnerability is starting to eat itself alive.
And people are feeling it. They just don’t know how to name it.
And now with AI in the mix, the collapse is being accelerated. With more people sounding like experts, “thought leaders”, and storytellers without having to say anything real. It’s why everything on LinkedIn reads like it came from a corporate motivational script. It’s why YouTube scripting sounds like fake-empathy bots. It’s why X is flooded with content bombs from people who suddenly know everything about everything, and why Instagram feels like the last open kiosk in a dead mall, still selling dream lifestyles, still pretending it’s 2016. It all blends. It all performs. But none of it sticks. That low-grade emptiness people are starting to feel is about to be everywhere.
That’s the real reason coaching, mentorship, “embodiment” work, and brand-building programs are flooding every genre and space. The signal’s thinning and the system knows it. So it starts generating new roles to keep itself alive with new voices, new programs, new identities. It's at the point where the format demands a refresh cycle.
But it doesn’t work. Because it’s not just the words that are tired, it’s the energy behind them. There’s no aliveness in the field. No current in the cadence. Just the residue of what used to feel true.
Eventually, the response flatlines, and it’s not even from people trying to be rebellious; it’s just from absence, because there’s nothing left to react to.
So what happens now?
That’s the real question. And not everyone will ask it fast enough. The smart ones already feel the shift, and can sense where the energy is thinning out not just in others but themselves and how they engage. They know it’s not about finding a new hook, but about stepping out of the performance loop before it folds in on itself completely.
What people are tired of:
Overexplaining. Every post trying to teach, guide, or lead something
The exhaustion of watching everyone act like they’re “on” all the time
Emotional arcs that feel focus-grouped
Captions that sound like a strategist wrote them
Performative vulnerability
Forced relatability
The illusion of depth with no actual insight
Sales language pretending to be storytelling
Everything being “for” something else and nothing standing on its own
What’s likely coming:
Flatness first. A wave of posts/people that get nothing back
A quiet drop in engagement. Less from rebellion, more from exhaustion
Irony and absurdism creeping back in. Not to destroy, just to breathe
Unstructured signal. Art, words, visuals that don’t ask for interpretation
People who speak without formatting
Creative voices that stop sounding like brand decks
A space where no one knows what works, and that being the point
Quite possibly that will be where the new opening begins. Not like a reset or a trend, just space to let all this built-up static of curated “life” dissipate from those spaces.
Where things aren’t made for attention, but come from attention. Quiet signal, and unpolished rhythm. The kind of communication that doesn’t teach or brand itself, it just moves.
That’s where everything will start to feel alive again, with energy that isn’t trying so hard. It doesn’t follow a cadence or a strategy. It doesn’t exist to prove it’s real. It just is, and can reset the nervous system in real time. It reminds people what coherence feels like.
The trajectory for that equalizing path is already around us. It won’t be about how good it looks or how right it sounds, but whether it carries something that actually lives.
Energy always finds its ground point. And the shift is already happening.
When you're ready to shape the unseen into image, the path opens. Let's begin.
