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 that his life 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, in the past few years, he noticed social media didn’t feel as fun anymore with artificial-intelligence slop dominating his feed, influencers advertising brands, and constant lifestyle comparison.
“I think people back then used to take a break from the real world by going on their phone, but now people are taking a break from their phone to spend time in the real world,” Richards told CNBC Make It.
As many of his Gen Z friends also caught on, he noticed instant benefits, from connecting with people in real life to feeling more confident about himself.
Going chronically offline is the latest trend to grip young people, and ironically it’s going viral on social media. There’s been a surge of TikTok videos of people vowing to delete social media apps in 2026 and engage more with in-person and analog hobbies.
When I discovered the trend, I decided to post on LinkedIn to see if there were any young people willing to speak to me about going offline. To my surprise, I received nearly 100 responses from Gen Z and millennials sharing stories about social media detoxes 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 2025 Deloitte consumer trends survey of more than 4,000 Brits found that nearly a quarter of all consumers had deleted a social media app in the previous 12 months, rising to nearly a third for Gen Zers.
Meanwhile, social media use has steadily declined since time spent on the platforms peaked in 2022, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries by the Financial Times and digital audience insights firm GWI.
Globally, adults 16 and over spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms by the end of 2024, down almost 10% since 2022, the report found. The decline was particularly pronounced among teens and 20-somethings.
Jason Dorsey, president of the Center for Generational Kinetics, said the increased “nastiness and divisiveness” online, including from leaders and politicians, is driving young people away from social media as they seek out greater control of their lives.
“We’re seeing that a group of Gen Z [and millennials] is choosing to leave social media entirely, and probably a larger group that’s choosing just to limit social media as they regain more of what they’re trying to find: balance and security and safety in their life,” Dorsey said.
‘Pressure platform’
Young people who are deleting their social media platforms cite the increasing pressures of being online as well as damage to their mental health as causes.
Deloitte’s consumer survey showed that almost a quarter of respondents who deleted social apps reported these apps had negatively impacted their mental health and consumed too much of their time.
“I feel like social media is now more like a pressure platform … you’re being sold everything, everywhere,” Richards said, adding that it influenced his own feelings of not having enough stuff or accomplishing enough in his career.
We’re definitely seeing a trend where people that are offline, unreachable, have a sort of cool factor around them…this person doesn’t need validation.
Matt Richards
23-year-old account manager
Similarly, 36-year-old entrepreneur Lucy Stace said she’s limiting her social media use because it’s “diminishing” her mental health despite it being essential to her business.
“We are just inundated all of the time with so much information … our brains aren’t capable of handling that much information,” she said. “We’re actually diminishing our brain’s capacity to be able to look inward and listen to ourselves, and we’re value tagging all of these things that aren’t actually important to us.”
Tech giants face “tremendous pressure” to monetize everything and drive revenue and profit, said Dorsey, which can be off-putting to younger generations.
“The result of that is that Gen Z, who are already sensitive to being advertised to — they are the most advertised-to generation in the history of the world — now they’re getting advertised to even more, and their feeds feel just [like] commercial after commercial,” Dorsey said.
Offline is the new ‘cool’
As the tide shifts against social media, account manager Richards noted that those who have gone offline have become more interesting. In the past, it was cooler to have lots of followers, but that appeal has faded, Richards noted.
“We’re definitely seeing a trend where people that are offline, unreachable, have a sort of cool factor around them, in terms of this person doesn’t need validation from how many likes or followers (they have) … and living life like they were in the 80s,” he said.
Social media manager Julianna Salguero, 31, said that social media stopped being cool when politicians and brands started using the platform.
“The more that we see brands and government officials and everybody being as online as you are, as a casual user, the more you’re going to want to pull back and switch it,” Salguero said.
As the digital generation struggles to make friends and find partners, they’re instead seeking out in-person events like speed dating and professional networking, citing high levels of loneliness and isolation as a key driver.
The University of Sheffield’s digital media lecturer, Ysabel Gerrard, said going offline 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 having to create an identity and edit themselves, she said.
“There’s an unbelievable wealth of literature now to tell us that the person we are on social media is not, and cannot be, the same person who we are in face-to-face settings,” Gerrard said. “It’s so much more than a trend.”
GWI analyst Chris Beer said he believes this is a “legitimate post-pandemic correction,” since people are spending less time at home and therefore less time on social media.
This shift is “largely due to structural time allocation,” he said, especially for younger users, rather than “an attitude-driven wholesale rejection of digital media.” Social media is still very integrated into people’s lives in areas including shopping, news and education, Beer said.
Analog is back
In a Substack post in September that got 5,000 likes, Salguero expressed a yearning to have lived life in the ’90s when dating apps and doom scrolling weren’t a prerequisite of young adulthood.
Her article, titled “How to have an analog fall,” wasn’t about doing digital detoxes or setting timers to limit social media use. Instead, Salguero outlined all the hobbies one could have outside of social media — from going on lunch dates to writing physical letters and opting for tangible media like newspapers.
Salguero said going 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 that world, it’s rewiring your brain to perceive things algorithmically, where I’d rather perceive things as I come across them,” she said. “So for me, the going analog of it all isn’t necessarily throwing my phone into the ocean, it’s more about, ‘How do I reset my relationship with it?'”
Indeed, young people are increasingly turning towards physical media as they seek a break from digital life. Some are purchasing vinyl and record players, while others are getting flip phones, a relic of the 2000s.
Stace and her boyfriend have started building a record collection and visit record stores when they can, she said.
Richards, after deleting all the social media apps off his smartphone, said his conversation with CNBC Make It has motivated him to purchase a “brick phone” too, reverting back to the time when phones were primarily used to call people.
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