There’s a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent any time on social media, when the endless scrolling stops feeling like leisure and more like labor. The feed never ends. Neither does the unease.
Young Americans are noticing. A surge of TikTok videos reveals people vowing to delete their apps and return to in-person and analog hobbies, including VHS tapes, vinyl, and, yes, brick phones.
As a digital minimalist, I find this news encouraging. A generation raised on high-definition screens is choosing to quietly put them down for something more authentic and tangible.
The numbers bear this out. Social media use peaked in 2022 and has since declined steadily. According to one report, the sharpest decline has been among 20-somethings. The very people for whom Silicon Valley built these platforms are the ones now leading an exodus away from these platforms.
What are these young people moving toward? Records. DVDs. Books that don’t track your attention span. Fortune reported that in northeast Los Angeles, a non-profit video store called Vidiots rents “over 1,000 movies per week—a number higher than even their busiest periods in the early 2000s.” The average renter used to be 50. Now the aisles are full of people in their 20s.
The charm of walking into a record or movie store is the freedom of choice. You’re not beholden to the ever-present algorithm baked into every social media platform. You’re also not the victim of clever engineering specially designed to keep you addicted to the screen. Just a wall or boxes filled with material to rifle through on your own terms.
This is what digital minimalism looks like.
Vinyl record revenues reached $1.4 billion in 2024, marking 18 consecutive years of growth. Hardback book sales are up. Demand for CD players in the UK rose 74% last year. This is more than a mere bout of nostalgia.
The social web, meanwhile, has become something different from what it promised. The "social" part was always the excuse. Attention was always the product. David Foster Wallace – who I still believe to be among the most important writers to reflect on addictive media – wrote:
For us, it’s gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being?
These questions seem to be what young Americans are grappling with right now.
One woman described the pull of going analog as a way to stop perceiving things algorithmically and start perceiving them as you come across them. This is the crux of it. An algorithm flattens experience into what’s most likely to hold your gaze. A record store, a hiking trail, or a lunch with a friend – these have no engagement metrics. They simply are.
Touch matters. The weight of a book. The warmth of a record. The body needs things the screen cannot provide. There’s a discipline in asking what you want to own. Not subscribe to, not stream, not borrow from a platform that can change its terms at will. Own. That question forces choices. It resists accumulation for its own sake.
The better communities forming now are smaller. Private chats, local clubs, people who show up in the same room. Presence. Irreproducible, unoptimized, yours.
The feed will still be there. It always will. The better question is whether you need it.
Collin Jones holds a BA in Film and an MFA in prose writing. Before transitioning into marketing, he worked as an editor at Blaze Media. He is the author of the novel "Project: Sleepless Dream" and a short story collection called "The Desertianists." In his free time, he writes on "Concordant Student."
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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