A young woman wearing headphones browses vintage vinyl records in a store.
Mihailomilovanovic | E+ | Getty Images
Account manager Matt Richards, 23, deleted all his social media apps from his phone last year and was surprised to find his life had changed for the better.
Richards had been using a smartphone since he was 11 years old and grew up with the device, like most Gen Z and millennials. However, over the past few years, he noticed that social media no longer seemed as fun to him. artificial intelligence slop dominating his feed, influencer advertising brands and constant lifestyle comparison.
“I think back then, people took a break from the real world by using their phones, but now people take a break from their phones to spend time in the real world,” Richards told CNBC Make It in an interview.
As many of his Gen Z friends also figured out, he noticed instant benefits, from connecting with people in real life to greater self-confidence.
On the way chronically offline is the latest trend taking over young people and ironically, it is going viral on social media. There has been an increase in people’s TikTok videos commit to deleting social media applications in 2026 and interact with in-person and analog hobbies.
When I discovered the trend, I decided to make a post on LinkedIn to see if there were young people ready to talk to me about the possibility of disconnecting. To my surprise, I received almost 100 responses from Gen Z and millennials sharing stories about social media detox and digital burnout.
They talked about ditching their smartphones for flip phones, visiting record stores to buy vinyl, taking up analog hobbies like knitting, and, most importantly, connecting with their friends in person.
A Deloitte Survey on Consumer Trends 2025 A study of more than 4,000 Brits found that almost a quarter of all consumers had deleted a social media app in the previous 12 months, compared to almost a third of Gen Z.
In the meantime, social media usage has steadily declinedwith time spent on platforms peaking in 2022, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out by the Financial Times and digital audience analytics firm GWI.
Globally, adults aged 16 and over spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, a decline of almost 10% since 2022, with the decline particularly pronounced among teens and those aged 20 and over.
Jason Dorsey, president of the Center for Generational Kinetics, said the increase in “nasty and divisiveness” online, including from leaders and politicians, is driving young people away from social media as they seek greater control over their lives.
“We are seeing that a group of Generation Z [and millennials] ” “It’s a group that’s choosing to leave social media altogether, and probably a larger group that’s choosing to just limit social media as they sort of find more of what they’re trying to find: balance and safety and security in their lives,” Dorsey said in a conversation with CNBC Make It.
“Pressure platform” Young people deleting their social media platforms cite the increase pressures of being online as well as the damage to their mental health.
Deloitte’s consumer survey showed that almost a quarter of respondents who deleted social media said it was because it had a negative impact on their mental health and took up too much of their time.
“I feel like social media is now more like a lobbying platform… you’re being sold everything, everywhere,” Richards said, adding that he felt like he didn’t have enough or accomplished enough in his career.
We’re definitely seeing a trend where people who are offline, unreachable, have some sort of cool factor around them…that person doesn’t need validation.
Matt Richards
Account manager, 23 years old
Similarly, 36-year-old millennial entrepreneur Lucy Stace told CNBC Make It that she limits her use of social media because it “diminishes” her mental health, despite it being essential to her business.
“We are inundated with so much information all the time… our brains are not able to handle that much information,” she said. “We actually diminish our brain’s ability to look inward and listen to ourselves, and we overemphasize marking all those things that aren’t actually important to us.”
Tech giants face “tremendous pressure” to monetize everything and generate revenue and profits, which is off-putting for younger generations, generational expert Dorsey explained.
“The result of this is that Generation Z, who are already susceptible to advertising — they’re the most advertised generation in the history of the world — now they’re getting even more advertising and their feeds just seem like commercial after commercial,” Dorsey said.
Offline is the new cool As the tide turns against social media, account manager Richards noted that those who have logged out have become more interesting. In the past, it was cooler to have a lot of followers, but that appeal has faded, Richards noted.
“I think we’re definitely seeing a trend where people who are offline, unreachable, have sort of a cool factor around them, in the sense that that person doesn’t need validation of how many likes or followers (they have)… and lives their life the way they did in the ’80s,” he added.
Julianna Salguero, 31, a social media manager, said social media stopped being cool when politicians and brands started using the platform.
“The more we see brands, government officials and everyone being as online as you are, as a casual user, the more you’ll want to step aside and change,” she said.
As a digital generation has difficulty making friends and finding partnersthey are instead looking for in-person events, from speed dating to professional networkingciting high levels of loneliness and isolation like a key engine.
Ysabel Gerrard, professor of digital media at the University of Sheffield, said switching off is a way for young people to take back control of their lives. Social media forces users to go through an “extremely exhausting process” of creating an identity and editing themselves, she said.
“There is now an incredible wealth of literature to tell us that the person we are on social media is not and cannot be the same person we are face-to-face,” Gerrard told CNBC Make It. “It’s more than a trend.”
However, GWI analyst Chris Beer said he was not convinced that the FT and GWI findings reflect a structural change and are instead a “legitimate post-pandemic correction” as people spend less time at home and therefore less time on social media.
He explained that this change is “largely due to a structural distribution of time”, particularly for younger users, rather than “a mass attitude-driven rejection of digital media”, as social media is still very integrated into people’s lives in areas such as shopping, information and education.
Analog is back In a Substack article in September, social media manager Salguero expressed his wish that he had lived in the ’90s, when dating apps and doom scrolling weren’t a prerequisite for being a young adult.
The article titled “How to have an analog fall” it wasn’t about doing digital detoxes or setting timers to limit social media use. Instead, Salguero described all the hobbies one can have outside of social media, like writing physical letters, going to lunch, or opting for physical media like newspapers.
The post received 5,000 likes and Salguero told CNBC that the move to analog is a “quiet revolution” against social media, streaming and content overload.
Lacy Stace and her boyfriend’s record collection.
“When you spend too much time in this world, it requires rewiring your brain to perceive things algorithmically, whereas I prefer to perceive things as I encounter them, so for me the analog of all of this isn’t necessarily throwing my phone in the ocean, it’s more about ‘how do I reset my relationship with it,'” she said.
In fact, more and more young people are turning more and more to physical media, such as purchasing record and vinyl playersas they seek to break away from digital life. Others invest in flip phonesa relic of the 2000s.
Today, entrepreneur Stace and her boyfriend have started building a record collection and visit record stores whenever they can.
Meanwhile, after deleting all social media apps from his smartphone, Richards said his conversation with CNBC Make It also motivated him to buy a physical phone.
