There’s a familiar narrative I see resurfacing in my circles.
Online education had its ‘moment’.
People are tired of screens.
In-person is ‘back’.
People are tired of screens.
In-person is ‘back’.
A part of me can’t help but tend to agree on some counts. God knows I’ve had my share of wasted time and energy leaked into hollow promises by online gurus and ridiculously inflated promises.
But the moving parts being conflated with another in the conversation the way they are saddens me a little.
There’s a baby holding on for dear life amidst it all, trying not to get thrown out with the dirty bathwater.
Let’s discuss.
When distance didn’t stand in the way
What’s being framed as a ‘failure’ by some is a negligence to distinguish:
- Medium from memory.
- Quality from quantity.
- Access from preference.
Those distinctions matter — and they’re not abstract ideas to me.
One of my most formative teachers once declared me his first official ‘disciple’ (just to be clear, we’re both careful with language like that).
Not because we lived near each other, (we didn’t). But because something in our interaction transcended the distance.
Our relationship unfolded online at a time when it might have still raised eyebrows.
Yet distance never diluted the connection. If anything, it sharpened it.
There was nowhere to hide behind presence, momentum, or atmosphere.
The work was the kind that either landed or didn’t.
And in my case it did, and went deep.
The effects that container has had on my professional life, my nervous system, and my family are still unfolding.
I don’t yet have language for all of it. I’m still processing the processing ripple effects.
What I do know is that in both cases, physical proximity wasn’t the deciding factor.
Commitment was. Readiness was.
His mentorship has been a game changer because of precision, ethics, and long-term thinking.
George has been working this way long before any of this was fashionable, before “online business” became a performance category rather than a discipline.
Then there’s my podcast Tapasya Loading where I’ve had the incredible honour of connecting and building a community with an incredible roster of guests primarily via the internet that have shaped the trajectory of my practice permanently.
Taken together, this meant that some of the most important pillars of my life philosophy- creative mastery, inner work, and ethical livelihood, are shaped through sustained tutelage and engagement with people operating at an exceptionally high level.
Not in spite of distance, but without distance being an obstacle.
Many of these relationships simply wouldn’t have been accessible to me through the channels that are often marketed as the “real deal.”
Online work didn’t dilute the seriousness of that. It made it possible.
The pandemic changed the meaning of “online”
For many people, online communication is no longer neutral.
Zoom didn’t simply host conversations during the pandemic. It became the container for uncertainty, blurred boundaries, and prolonged nervous system activation.
Screens weren’t optional. They were compulsory. Often the only way to communicate.
Time collapsed. Social cues thinned. Work, intimacy, fatigue, and crisis shared the same rectangle.
So when we say we’re “done with online learning,” it’s worth investigating whether where we’re responding from.
The format? Or the association our bodies retain with that period of time?
Research on trauma and associative memory shows that environments repeatedly paired with stress can later trigger aversion, even when the original threat has passed (van der Kolk, 2014; Brewin et al., 2008).
In that sense, much of the backlash against online education may be less pedagogical than physiological.
Online education carries a very realistic layer of PTSD with it.
It’d be a pity if we let that define the entire story.
Quantity didn’t kill quality — it buried discernment
There is a real issue online right now.
The sheer volume of content has collapsed signal-to-noise ratios.
Anyone can teach. Everyone is teaching.
Credentials are often implied rather than articulated.
Algorithms reward familiarity and confidence faster than depth or coherence.
And now with AI, everybody sounds like they know what they’re talking about to the casual observer.
The levels of discernment now require entirely new leagues of effort.
What’s rarely acknowledged in the meantime, is that in-person education has historically also had incredibly uneven quality, opaque hierarchies, charismatic charlatans, and poorly held rooms.
Physical proximity simply made it easier to gloss over many of those loopholes.
And the role online spaces have played in removing some of that camouflage is not getting enough credit.
Access is not a lifestyle preference
I spent over twelve years of my life in pre-internet India.
I’ve been the guy who was asked to apply for four visas just to make it to a single professional event.
I’ve cancelled work repeatedly due to bureaucratic delays in my past life.
Before changing nationality, red tape was what often decided which opportunities I could or could not accept. Regardless of preparation or invitation.
For many global creatives and students, education still involves:
- Visa systems that can stretch for months.
- Currency disparities that quietly multiply costs.
- Postal systems that miss deadlines.
- Flights that cost more than the entire course does.
- Safety concerns that are never evenly distributed or even addressed.
These are not edge cases. They’re daily realities.
Online education didn’t just offer solutions to access problems. It also exposed them in a subtle way that made many of us a lot more uncomfortable than we might be willing to admit.
The unspoken dynamics of physical rooms
Here’s another part of this conversation that’s rarely named: how power moves through bodies.
Physical presence is not neutral.
Size, volume, gender, confidence, and social conditioning all shape the manner in which we occupy space.
Or withdraw from them.
I’ve been in rooms where a six-feet-six presence did most of the talking without really saying very much at all.
I’ve also witnessed less romantic realities:
- People disengaged but still visible.
- Others falling asleep mid-session.
- Hygiene being an unspoken distraction.
- Daily commutes of four or five hours hollowing out attention before learning even began.
None of these invalidate in-person education. But it does complicate the nostalgia around it.
Every learning environment comes with strengths and weaknesses.
Physical rooms aren’t exempt from that tenet.
Online education is harder to bluff
This is a part that is often overlooked.
I’ve been in online webinars where it was cringingly clear that I’d signed up for a marketing campaign with very little substance to offer a student.
The good news was that all I had to do was click on a button and stop wasting my time or energy.
That’s all.
What that exposed to me was how online learning environments make it more difficult to hide fluff behind charisma or proximity.
Participants can disengage quickly and painlessly when something doesn’t land.
Or worse still, feel unsafe.
People can’t rely on atmosphere alone. Substance has to carry the virtual room. Cocktails and snacks won’t cover up a ‘cover-up’.
That ease of exit can, of course, exacerbate commitment issues. But the way I see it, immersion thus becomes a choice, rather than a logistical enforcement.
Why the Words Matter
There’s a language problem distorting this whole discussion as well.
What’s often framed as online versus in-person is really about location and time sovereignty.
The shift has lesser to do with whether we’re on a screen during the work itself, but that our educational needs no longer get to be dictated by where we live or how we structure our time.
That distinction matters a great deal to me personally, which is why I’m careful not to describe myself as an ‘online’ persona and insist on specifying this:
- I’m an artist and educator
- I am location-independent.
I work the way I do because I collaborate across continents and seven time zones with people whose lives, practices, and constraints don’t allow for the friction of doing everything as it was done ‘traditionally’.
Now that doesn’t negate physical presence.
I play concerts. I run in-person workshops. Retreats that offer something no digital space can.
I would never try to perform a concert online (that never worked for me).
But none of that cancels the value of location and time independence to my coaching or consulting. Or even studio projects, much of which has been remote even before the pandemic, even amidst artists often living in the same city.
Outsourcing parts of the process ‘online’ expands what’s possible.
Collapsing that distinction into a debate about quality misses the point entirely.
Final Thoughts: What’s actually ending
The way I see it, what tends to be presented as the rejection of a format of late, is actually a reality that is closer to a very different problem: trauma.
Online education entered most of our lives under conditions that surrounded what was essentially one of the most urgent cases of unprecedented global emergency in history.
Conditions that were neither chosen nor designed for such circumstances. Let alone learning.
It became the place where everything happened at once. Often including distorted versions of activities that didn’t necessarily belong there.
Obligation, fear, the collapse of rhythm. Desperate attempts to connect on levels that simply didn’t fit.
The entirety of a global coping mechanism felt its weight being pushed onto one single medium.
That residue of that mammoth event has not been processed yet.
So, as humanity’s knee-jerk reaction is designed to do, it directed much of its pent-up frustration at the medium itself.
So, where does that leave those of us who had been working location-independently the whole time anyways?
In my opinion, at a point where levelling up quality will be crucial.
And in my world, that’s good news.
Now, everybody will have to be more selective.
Educators will have to articulate what they actually offer more clearly. And live up to them.
And choose their people more mindfully as well.
Students and clients will be less willing to tolerate incoherence.
Performed charisma without substance.
Containers that don’t hold what they promised.
Walking away has become easier. And staying, more deliberate.
'Online education' was never meant to mirror physical classrooms, but transcend them.
Its emergence challenged long-standing assumptions around access, cost, safety, mobility, and legitimacy that had gone largely unquestioned.
A medium that brought the promise of freeing up two of the most valuable resources human have:
Time and space.
What we choose to do with such will, as always, decide the crux of the matter.
References
Brewin, C. R., Andrews, B., & Valentine, J. D. (2008). Meta-analysis of risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder in trauma-exposed adults. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 76(3), 398–410.
Means, B., Toyama, Y., Murphy, R., Bakia, M., & Jones, K. (2010). Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning. U.S. Department of Education.
OECD. (2021). Education at a Glance: Global Access, Equity, and Digital Infrastructure.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.
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