[travisgriggs]

Obviously people didn’t quit email. But I also don’t “engage” with email with anything near the intensity that I used to. 20 years ago…? One of the hottest romcoms ever, was built around our feverish engagement with email: “You’ve got Mail!” Can you imagine that being a pitch for a romcom next year? They’d laugh you out of the room. Because while people still use email, they don’t engage with it the way they used to.

I think this sense of disengagement is what the author is trying to metaphorically capture with the idea of “logging off”. It might just be my family and peer groups, but I do sense this in general. The internet and its various “social” constructs feel more and more like they’ve crossed that line in dating relationships where the other person becomes “clingy/needy” and it starts to grow wearisome and cringy. I think that causes people to quietly disengage.