A 'quiet revolution': How young people are swapping social media with lunch dates, vinyl records and brick phones

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 in an interview.

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 an surge in TikTok videos of people vowing to delete social media apps in 2026 and engaging with in-person and analog hobbies.

When I discovered the trend, I decided to make a 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, with time spent on the platforms peaking in 2022, 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 found.

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, with the decline being particularly pronounced amongst teens and 20-something-year-olds.

Jason Dorsey, President of the Center for Generational Kinetics, said that 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 sort of regain more of what they're trying to find: balance and security and safety in their life," Dorsey said in a conversation with CNBC Make It.

Young people deleting their social media platforms cite the increasing 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 reported that it was because it 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 he felt like he didn't have enough things or had accomplished enough in his career.

Similarly, 36-year-old millennial entrepreneur Lucy Stace told CNBC Make It that 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, which is off-putting to younger generations, generational expert Dorsey explained.

"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 commercial after commercial," Dorsey said.

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.

"I think 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 added.

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," she said.

As the digital generation struggles to make friends and find partners, they're instead seeking out in-person events from speed dating to 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 told CNBC Make It. "It's so much more than a trend."

However, GWI analyst Chris Beer said he's not convinced that the FT and GWI findings reflect a structural shift and is instead a "legitimate post-pandemic correction," as people are spending less time at home and therefore less time on social media.

He said shift is "largely due to structural time allocation," especially for younger users, rather than "an attitude-driven wholesale rejection of digital media," as social media is still very integrated into people's lives in areas including shopping, news and education.

In a Substack post in September, social media manager Salguero expressed a yearning to have lived life in the '90s when dating apps and doom scrolling weren't a prerequisite of being a young adult.

The 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 writing physical letters, going on lunch dates, or opting for physical media like newspapers.

The post received 5,000 likes, and Salguero told CNBC that going analog is a "quiet revolution" against social media, streaming, and content overload.

"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, 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'," she said.

Indeed, more young people are increasingly turning towards physical media, such as purchasing vinyl and record players, as they seek a break from digital life. Others are investing in flip phones, a relic of the 2000s.

Now, entrepreneur Stace and her boyfriend have started building a record collection and visit record stores when they can.

Meanwhile, after deleting all the social media apps off his smartphone, Richards said his conversation with CNBC Make It has motivated him to purchase a brick phone, too.