Why are young people leaving social media?

Matt Richards, a 23-year-old account manager, deleted all social media apps from his phone last year and was amazed at how his life changed for the better.

Richards has been using smartphones since he was 11 years old, and like most Gen Z and Millennials, he grew up with them. But in recent years, he’s noticed that social media has become less fun, with artificial intelligence taking over his feeds, influencers promoting brands, and lifestyles being constantly compared.

“I think people back then were on their phones, away from the real world, and now people are off their phones to spend time in the real world,” Richards told CNBC Make It.

Many of my Gen Z friends similarly noticed immediate benefits, such as being able to connect with people in real life and feeling more confident about themselves.

Being chronically offline is the latest trend to captivate young people, and ironically, it’s spreading rapidly on social media. TikTok videos of people vowing to delete social media apps and engage in more in-person, analog hobbies by 2026 are proliferating.

When I discovered this trend, I decided to post on LinkedIn to see if anyone would talk to me about going offline. To my surprise, I received nearly 100 responses from Gen Z and Millennials sharing their stories of social media detox and digital burnout.

They talked about ditching their smartphones for flip phones, going to record stores to buy records, taking up analog hobbies like knitting, and most importantly, connecting with friends in person.

Deloitte’s 2025 Consumer Trends Survey of more than 4,000 Brits found that nearly a quarter of all consumers have deleted a social media app in the past 12 months, rising to nearly a third of Gen Z.

Meanwhile, time spent on social media has steadily declined since its peak 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.

According to the report, adults aged 16 and over worldwide will spend an average of 2 hours and 20 minutes a day on social platforms by the end of 2024, down almost 10% compared to 2022. The decline was especially noticeable among people in their teens and 20s.

Jason Dorsey, director of the Center for Generational Dynamics, said growing “discomfort and discord” online, including with leaders and politicians, was driving young people away from social media as they sought more control over their lives.

“We’re seeing a group of Gen Z (and Millennials) choosing to stay away from social media entirely, and perhaps a larger group just choosing to limit social media in order to regain more of what they’re trying to find, like balance, security, and safety in their lives,” Dorsey said.

Young people who are deleting social media platforms cite the increased pressure of being online and the damage to their mental health as reasons.

According to a Deloitte consumer survey, nearly a quarter of respondents who deleted social apps reported that these apps were having a negative impact on their mental health and wasting too much time.

“I feel like social media has become kind of a platform of pressure right now…everything is being sold to you everywhere,” Richards said, adding that it feeds into feelings of not having enough or not achieving enough in one’s career.

Similarly, Lucy Stace, a 36-year-old entrepreneur, said she limits her use of social media because it is “damaging” her mental health, even though it is essential to her business.

“We’re constantly bombarded with so much information…our brains don’t have the capacity to process that much information,” she said. “In fact, we’ve reduced our brain’s ability to look inward and listen to ourselves, placing value on tagging everything that doesn’t actually matter to us.”

Dorsey said tech giants face “tremendous pressure” to monetize everything and increase revenue and profits, which may be uncomfortable for younger generations.

“As a result, Gen Z, already sensitive to publicity and they are the most publicized generation in the history of the world, are now receiving even more publicity, and their feeds feel like commercial after commercial,” Dorsey said.

As the tide turns on social media, account manager Richards noted that interest from people who have gone offline has increased. Richards points out that while it used to be cooler to have a lot of followers, that appeal has waned.

“We’re definitely seeing a trend of people who are offline and unreachable who have some sort of cool factor around them. This person doesn’t need validation through likes or follower counts and is living a life like it’s the ’80s,” he said.

Social media manager Juliana Salguero, 31, said social media stopped being cool when politicians and brands started using it.

“The more brands and government officials and everyone are online just like you, the average user, the more you want to stand back and switch,” Salguero said.

The digital generation is struggling to make friends and find a partner, instead seeking in-person events such as speed dating and professional networking, citing high levels of loneliness as a key factor.

Isabelle Gerrard, a lecturer in digital media at the University of Sheffield, said going offline was a way for young people to take back control of their lives. She said social media forces users to go through a “very arduous process” of having to create identities and edit themselves.

Gerrard said: “There is now an incredible body of literature telling us that the people we are on social media are not and cannot be the same people we are in person.” “It’s much more than just a trend.”

GWI analyst Chris Beale said he believed this was a “legitimate post-pandemic correction” as people spent less time at home and less time on social media.

This change, he said, was not a “massive rejection based on attitudes towards digital media” but “more to do with structural time allocation”, especially for younger users. Beer said social media remains deeply integrated into people’s lives in areas such as shopping, news and education.

In a September Substack post that received 5,000 likes, Salguero expressed a yearning to live the life of the ’90s, when dating apps and doom scrolling weren’t the prerequisites of youth.

Her article, titled “How to Greet Analog Fall,” wasn’t about going on a digital detox or setting a timer to limit your social media use. Instead, Salguero outlined all the hobbies you can have outside of social media, from lunch dates to writing physical letters to choosing tangible media like newspapers.

Salguero said going analog is a “quiet revolution” against social media, streaming and content overload.

“If you spend too much time in that world, your brain rewires itself to perceive things algorithmically. I’d rather recognize things as I encounter them,” she said. “So for me, going analog is not necessarily about throwing your phone into the ocean, but rather, ‘How do we reset our relationship with it?'”

In fact, young people are increasingly turning to physical media in search of a break from their digital lives. Some people buy record players and record players, while others buy flip phones, a relic of the 2000s.

Stace and her boyfriend are starting to build a record collection and visit record stores whenever possible, she said.

After deleting all social media apps from her smartphone, Richards said her conversation with CNBC Make It motivated her to buy a “brick phone” as well, taking her back to the days when phones were primarily used for calling.

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