The Onion – everyone’s favorite satire newspaper – is returning to running a print edition.

Not a joke.

A response to digital fatigue.

We are, to put it mildly, over Zoomed.

The pandemic exacerbated the increasing pressure to Always Be Online. And now, we tired.

Blurry-eyed, we take a break from one screen to look at another.

I’ve heard digital fatigue as a reason for lower-than-expected survey response rates.

I think it’s why my workshop requests are now 75% in-person / 25% Zoom.

Are you seeing digital fatigue in your business as well? Tell me about it.

Looking closer, digital fatigue may be generational.

The Onion’s readership is probably aged 35 and up. We remember a time before ABO (Always Be Online) was a way of life.

We are the ones buying vintage typewriters and actual film cameras.

The young 20-somethings in my workshops are so used to ABO they literally have to borrow a pencil when I ask them to quickly sketch something on paper. (Though I’ve heard the dumb phones are trending with this crowd.)

Digital fatigue may also be geographic.

Those of us working in rural areas or developing parts of the world could be pre-fatigue.

But I think, as AI is increasingly used for evil to make fake images and videos, we’re all going to hit the digital fatigue wall.

We’re quickly learning that we can only trust what we see in real life.

So what will this mean for your business?

You might need to go back to paper surveys. Or door-to-door. Or all of the above.

You might go back to hand-written thank you notes instead of those digital e-cards that get deleted immediately.

Perhaps you need to replace a Zoom or two with a flight and a face-to-face.

Ash Ambridge tells of an entrepreneur who started a print paper to the tune of $800K in income. Maybe you pivot to media mogul.

I don’t have the answer but I can tell you that I’m thinking about this just as much as I’m thinking about how I’ll incorporate AI and new tech into my business. I suspect that we’ll have to be both very online and very offline to be successful.