- After Hours
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- ISSUE #002
After Hours
The weekly newsletter covering tech, culture, & life outside our digital world
ISSUE #002: The Counterculture is Offline Pt. II
1 Thing From Me
This is the second part of a two-part series. If you haven’t already, please read last week’s Issue #001.
THE DINNER
I went to a dinner party last weekend. Someone sitting next to me said something interesting as we began clearing the table:
"Let's mix it up and try out something new tonight guys. You know, c'mon, we've only got 500 weekends in our 20s!"
500 weekends? 10 years x 52 weeks = 520; let's say you're sick 2 out of each year; that leaves us with 500 weekends. Really? That's all we got?
Sitting there, marg in hand, underneath the candlelight in my friend's Manhattan apartment, I began to ponder:
Wait a second, I'm almost 25… I'm already half spent! Just this year alone, 2% of my 20s is up. Is my little cousin gonna start calling my unc now? Ah what does it matter, I'm here now surrounded by good food, drink, and company. Screw it.
After my brief nonverbal episode, that same someone sitting next to me follows up on his interjection with a proposition for the group: "We should play TikTok roulette!"
What? TikTok roulette?
More on that in a minute.
THE THESIS
In Issue #001 (again, please read that first) I promised I'd share my thesis on curbing technology for more life, less distractions. Here it goes:
People want genuine connection but don't know how to get it. People know technology harms them but won't change. But there may be a way we can solve solve both— and it starts offline.
Modern life has an insatiable desire for convenience. As software continues to eat the world and AI integrates into our lives, more of our tangible spaces and authentic experiences risk being transformed into digital code and shallow entertainment.
Remember piling into the car for Blockbuster night? (I’m dating myself again here) Picking a movie wasn’t just grabbing a case; it was arguing over what to watch, getting chastised for hanging in the R-rated aisle, begging for candy, the whole messy ritual.
We've gained access to instant entertainment and endless choices yet sacrificed communal spaces and collective experiences, ultimately forfeiting something essential: our sense of meaning and humanity.
What else do our technologies truly cost us? Is it just the 5.3 hours per day the average American spends on their phone? Or is it the depth of our conversations, the intensity of our experiences, our ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions?
Is there enough awareness surrounding these costs, and if so, why haven't things changed? Maybe because we’re hooked on the convenience, even as it hollows us out.
Despite the world’s technological saturation, we each possess one unassailable power that nobody can take from us— our ability to choose. We get to choose.
In light of that, I want to propose an alternative. Not a permanent rejection of technology—I'm writing this on a computer, you're reading it on a screen—but a temporary space where we can be freed of technology-spawned problems, if only for the night.
The radical act is simple but increasingly profound: Remove technology, so we can learn for ourselves what it means to be present and embrace our shared humanity.
Imagine this: conversations that flow for hours, eye contact that doesn't break, dancing without worrying anyone’s recording. The mere presence of phones in social spaces creates interpersonal distance, which is why we need an alternative.
The power of an offline space cannot be put to words, but can be felt— the electric energy of a room crescendos when everybody is fully there and a depth to the experience emerges when distraction isn't an option.
After Hours begins by bringing phone-free events to nightlife, creating real memories that last instead of stories that disappear after 24 hours. People want environments where interacting with each other is the expectation, and we’re just getting started. In time, offline spaces will gain traction and return as a default mode for engaging with the world.
The question for us all to consider right now is this: How can we solve for human connection without first connecting as humans?
This newsletter isn't about having all the answers. It's about breaking the spell, asking the right questions, and creating spaces for authentic interaction. I want us all to get f***ing pumped to turn off our phones for the weekend and rediscover the art of being fully present and alive in the real world.
Care to join me?
THE NIGHTMARE
“OHHHHH!!! Tommy has a video of a strippers doing backflips!”
Here’s how TikTok roulette works: everyone at the table gets out their phones, opens TikTok (or Reels), passes it to the left, and repeats. Sounds fun, right?
Wrong. I wish I’d had some spine and said “what an awful idea” and ended things before they started. But I was outnumbered and slow to react, most everyone bought in right away. I wasn’t opposed for fear of what they might see on my feed, I was more ashamed of what had become of our discourse.
Influencers barking at me through the camera, travel edits of places I can’t pronounce, cooking asmr, cute little videos of cats and dogs and the like— the girls were mostly fine. For some of the guys it was a different story, I’m sure you can imagine what we all saw.
Round and around, swipe after swipe, the stimulus of the group continued to build. It seemed the deeper we ventured into each other’s algorithms, the more absurd and sensational the payoff. The group had become a single organism overcome with consumptive desire.
Russian dashcam collisions, JD Vance with tits, monkeys drinking Gatorade, fireworks exploding in garages, all the good stuff. More more more.
Fifteen minutes it went on like this. Fifteen minutes before the novelty had worn off. I had left the table and gone into the kitchen amidst the growing laughter and amusement because some part of me had become physically ill and repulsed.
When I returned, I felt the connection for the night had been severed. Everyone was putting on their coats and getting ready to leave. And I felt as if had less in common with these people than before.
Now look, I’ll admit I was curious for a little. However I’m trying my best to be a serious person nowadays and that end to the dinner party was not it.
The activity does serve as an interesting social experiment though. Now let me expand on it as a thought exercise here:
I shared a blog post last week titled The Price of Mass Amusement. It’s a long read but I encourage you to check it out. The best one sentence summary I can think of is this: “The medium is the message.”
The main medium through which we consume information today, social media, affects our discourse not only in terms of what messages we choose to share, but how we exchange information. Beginning with television and now with social media, amusement has become the master virtue Americans seek to consume, and thus our amusement-seeking behaviors are reflected in how we communicate with each other.
Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.
Is the conversational lull at the end of a meal too uncomfortable for us to handle? Is passing around the reflective slot machines of our individual psyches the best way to get to know each other? In what other contexts do we seek to amuse each other?
And back to what I opened with earlier about the finite supply of precious weekends in our youth— do we want to spend it constantly engaging in trivial discourse for sake of amusement?
THE HOPE
I don’t want you, beloved reader, to ever have to play TikTok roulette. Our mission is quite the opposite: we want to spread the power of disconnecting together in social environments, at least 1x a week. One of the best ways to do that is by joining us at an event:
KD is hosting offline events at classy venues in cities across the world. Coming up next weekend is Lisbon (03/13) and Abu Dhabi (03/15). Check out our events calendar and enter your email below and subscribe to stay in the loop about future offline events.
Even if you can’t make it to one of our events, stick around. You’re not going to want to miss the next few issues I’ve got lined up— practical guides for building an offline lifestyle and explorations of the latest in tech, culture, & life outside our digital world.
I hope you got some value out of this. If it really resonated, please consider sharing with a friend who could benefit from it’s message. Say something cool like, “Hey, was reading this and thought about you ;)” It’s word-of-mouth referrals from hot people like you that make your friend’s day.
See you next Friday.
— Kyle
From The Feed
— Anaïs Nin, 1939
Courage as a virtue is in low supply. Go out into the world and stop TikTok roulettes.
A testimonial I couldn’t agree with more: “One former student, Cole Goldberg, mentioned in an email that his favourite times are Friday nights at Chabad, when there’s no phone use because of Shabbat. People gather for dinner and sometimes stay all night long, relishing uninterrupted conversations that would otherwise be impossible. ‘I think we all need some kind of Chabad once a week,’ Goldberg wrote.”
Wouldn’t happen at one of our events though.
Nymphs Dancing to Pan’s Flute, 1920, by Joseph Tomanek
— soli (@solisolsoli)
4:30 PM • Mar 5, 2025
This is exactly how it feels to join us at an offline jazz event.
From The Community
This newsletter isn't just my voice echoing into the void (it was last week)— it's the beginning of a conversation. And like any good conversation at a dimly lit bar, I want to hear your stories.
Share with me:
The moment when you realized your phone was controlling more of your life than you were
The unexpected connection that you made in your life recently
The cultural shift you've noticed that no one else seems to be talking about
Your clever hack for creating phone-free spaces in your daily life
or anything else you desire really. I’m open to ideas here.
The most compelling stories will be featured anonymously in next week's issue, creating a mosaic of our collective offline experience.
Reply to this email with your story! If you’re reading online, fill out this form.
What’s Next
You’ll be hearing a lot more from me. If you enjoyed reading this issue, please consider subscribing to receive a new edition of After Hours every Friday.
Subscribe to our events calendar if you want to join us offline! We have upcoming events in Lisbon and Yas Island (Abu Dhabi):
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