For years, being “terminally online” was an insult. It meant someone whose worldview had been warped by too much time on the internet: too much discourse, too many niche references, too much awareness of things that only mattered inside a very specific bubble.

But somewhere along the way, especially in tech, venture, finance, media, and other internet-native industries, being terminally online became almost complimentary. People now say they want someone “terminally online” for a role. What they usually mean is that they want someone plugged in: someone who knows what is happening before everyone else, understands the people and companies shaping the conversation, and can read shifts in real time.

There is real value in that. In fast-moving industries, it helps to know when a new AI model drops, when someone important joins or leaves a company, when a founder is gaining momentum, when a company is suddenly being dragged online, or when the conversation around a category is starting to change. Being hyper-online can give you speed, context, and cultural fluency.

It also creates a sense of belonging. Everyone is following the same accounts, reacting to the same stories, sharing the same jokes, and participating in the same rolling conversation. Shared context feels good. Whether it is the Will Smith Oscars slap, the Spotify disco ball logo drama, or another Forbes 30 Under 30 arrest, you feel like you are all watching the same movie together.

But the deeper question is not whether being online has value. It obviously does. The question is whether being terminally online is the best place to invest your energy. It’s my point of view that the better long-term strategy is not to become even more online, but rather to double down on real-life.

In other words: terminally IRL.

If information is online, it is public. Everyone has access to it. Everyone can follow the same founders, VCs, researchers, journalists, operators, and internet personalities. Everyone can read the same posts, screenshots, newsletters, launch announcements, and reaction threads.

Knowing what is happening still matters, but the advantage from simply knowing is shrinking. If everyone has access to the same information, the edge is not access. The edge is interpretation, synthesis, judgment, and context.

That context is much harder to get online because online environments are optimized for broadcasting, not truth-seeking. People post what they are comfortable saying in public. They post what supports their narrative. They post what helps them recruit, fundraise, sell, position, or look smart. They are not necessarily lying, but they are curating.

That creates a distorted view of the world. Online, everyone seems earlier, sharper, richer, more certain, and further ahead. Everyone is deploying agents. Everyone is building at the frontier. Everyone has momentum. Everyone sounds certain.

Then you meet people in person and realize most people are still figuring things out. Most companies are messier than they look. Most people are less certain than they sound. Most of the frontier is more experimental, fragile, and unresolved than the internet makes it appear.

Twitter is not real life. But if you spend enough time there, it starts to feel like it is.

That is the trap of being terminally online: you may be closer to the discourse, but you’re not necessarily closer to the truth.

The biggest advantage of being in person is that it is where the real signal lives. People will tell you things face-to-face that they would never post publicly: what is actually working, what is not, what they are worried about, what customers are really saying, what their company is struggling with, and what they think but cannot say online.

Online, you get the public narrative. In person, you get the private truth.

That distinction matters because online environments reward performance. They reward certainty, polish, confidence, speed, and narrative control. In person, when trust is present, people are more willing to be complicated. They will admit uncertainty. They will talk through what they are still trying to understand. They will tell you what sounds good publicly but is harder privately.

That is why IRL context is so valuable. It gives you access not just to what people are saying, but to what they actually believe. You hear hesitation. You see what lights them up. You notice what they avoid. You get the story behind the story.

Over time, that private context compounds. You start to understand which companies are real and which are mostly narrative. Which founders have heat and which have depth. Which categories are genuinely moving and which are just loud. Which people are trusted by people who actually know them.

The internet can tell you what everyone is talking about, but real life tells you what matters.

Serendipity is where a lot of the magic happens, but algorithms are designed to predict what you already want. They give you more of what you have clicked, watched, liked, shared, and followed. That makes the internet efficient, but it also makes it narrowing. You get more of what you already know you care about.

Real life works differently. You go to an event expecting to talk about AI and end up spending half an hour talking about photography. You meet someone through work and discover you grew up twenty minutes apart. You sit next to someone at dinner and learn about a market, hobby, problem, company, or idea you would never have searched for.

You cannot search for what you do not know exists.

That is why serendipity matters. Some of the most important relationships, ideas, and opportunities come from adjacent collisions, not optimized feeds. Algorithms are good at giving you more of what you already know you want. Real life is better at introducing you to the thing you did not know you needed.

It is also why events are so hard to judge in advance. You can go to something that looks mediocre on paper and meet one person who opens an entirely new path. You can go to something that looks perfect and leave with nothing. That unpredictability is frustrating, but it is also the point.

The right way to evaluate IRL is not by expecting every event, dinner, coffee, or gathering to justify itself immediately. Sometimes the win is one good conversation. One person you actually want to follow up with. One piece of information you did not have before. One unexpected connection.

Events are a power-law activity: most are fine, some are terrible, and a small number make the rest worth it by a mile.

Once you understand that, the pattern starts to look different. You are not just attending an event. You are increasing your surface area for luck.

Relationships are not built through information exchange alone. They are built through presence, energy, humor, timing, vulnerability, and repeated human contact.

You can meet someone online. You can maintain a relationship online. But the depth of a relationship changes once you have spent real time together. You learn how someone thinks. You pick up on their rhythm, judgment, generosity, ambition, weirdness, and sense of humor. You know whether you actually click.

Your network is not a contact list. It is accumulated context.

That context becomes infrastructure: the underlying layer that makes your work, career, company, or community more defensible over time. Functionality can be copied. Content can be generated. Outreach can be automated. But shared history, trust, and reputation are much harder to replicate.

This is what makes IRL so powerful. It is not just another channel. It is a trust-building mechanism.

All of this becomes even more important in an AI-first world. AI lowers the cost of content, outreach, applications, research, and communication. That is powerful, but also means the digital world gets noisier: more posts, more messages, more applications, more synthetic expertise, more automated relationship-building, more slop.

When everyone can generate more, volume stops being impressive. A polished resume matters less when every resume is polished. A personalized cold email matters less when every cold email is personalized. A sharp post matters less when sharp posts are cheap.

The scarce thing becomes proof of reality: Have I met you? Do I trust you? Do you have judgment? Are you credible? Do people I trust trust you? Have you shown up consistently in rooms that matter?

As more daily interaction gets mediated by agents, bots, and automated systems, work may get faster and more efficient, but it will also lose some of the ordinary human texture that used to be built into the day.

This agent-ification of daily life does not make humans less important; it makes them more important. In-person interaction becomes a stronger form of verification because you can test what is almost impossible to fake: chemistry, judgment, curiosity, warmth, credibility, and intent.

The more agents sit between us, the more valuable it becomes to remove the interface entirely.

The opportunity is not just to spend more time IRL. It is to start building IRL trust before everyone realizes how valuable it is.

As more people and companies recognize the value of in-person connection, the IRL world will become crowded too. Anyone who has lived through (and survived) a “tech week” already knows this. Suddenly there are hundreds of dinners, panels, happy hours, founder meetups, investor salons, side events, and private gatherings competing for the same limited attention.

The problem is no longer scarcity. It is overload.

And when that happens, people stop choosing events. They choose hosts.

They choose the person whose dinners consistently have the right mix of people. The company whose gatherings reliably lead to useful conversations. The community where they know they will meet someone smart, generous, relevant, or surprising. The host who has already earned trust by creating rooms that feel worth showing up for.

That trust is much easier to build before the market is saturated. If you start now, by the time everyone else decides IRL matters, the advantage will already belong to the people who have built a reputation for it.

And that reputation compounds. If someone comes to your dinner, event, or gathering and has a great time, you earn a small amount of social credibility. If they meet someone valuable, laugh, learn something, or feel like the room was thoughtfully assembled, they are more likely to come back (and refer people they know).

The next time they have five options, they will not evaluate all five from scratch. They will choose the person or organization with a track record they trust.

That does not require hosting massive conferences or building formal communities. It can start with a dinner, a recurring breakfast, a small salon, a group walk, a founder lunch, or simply being the person who consistently introduces thoughtful people to each other. The format matters less than the trust behind it.

Eventually, the challenge will not be finding something to attend. It will be knowing what is worth showing up for. And when that happens, the people who invested early in building high-quality rooms will become filters for everyone else.

Being terminally IRL does not mean randomly attending everything, filling your calendar for the sake of being busy, or saying yes to every happy hour, panel, networking event, and dinner invite. That is a fast way to waste time and burn out.

It means building a thoughtful strategy around real-life experiences, then spending more time in rooms than on feeds.

Are you trying to meet customers? Find a job? Build founder relationships? Source investments? Hire talent? Find a co-founder? Make friends? Build community? Your goals should determine who you spend time with and what kind of in-person format makes sense.

Once that framework is clear, every invitation becomes easier to judge. Not by whether you are tired, bored, or vaguely interested, but by whether the room or the experience aligns with your strategy.

It means crafting your own experiences, whether that means one-on-one coffees, hosting dinners, organizing small hangs, creating recurring meetups, or simply being more deliberate about lunches and after-work plans.

Terminally IRL is not about being everywhere. It is about being in the right rooms, with the right people, often enough for trust, context, and opportunity to compound.

None of this means the internet does not matter. It does. Being online helps you understand the discourse, track emerging narratives, find interesting people, and stay aware of what is changing. In many industries, opting out entirely would be a mistake.

But being online should be an input, not the whole strategy.

Use online to know what is happening. Use in-person to understand what matters. Use online to find people. Use real life to build trust with them. Use online for speed. Use IRL for depth.

The future does not belong to people who log off completely. It belongs to people who know how to move between both worlds.

Be terminally online enough to know what is happening.

Be terminally IRL enough to know what matters.