In 2025 alone, over 11.7 million Instagram posts carried the hashtag #nostalgia, Google searches for “90s movies” had doubled since 2015, and Y2K aesthetic searches had spiked 891% since November 2024. I had chronicled the growing interest in vinyl, CDs and analog experiences among Gen Z, “this wave of anemoia — longing for a past you never lived — makes perfect sense once you hear Gen Z explain it themselves.”
My conversations with 13- to 25-year-olds revealed the core tension: a longing for a past when they were tech-free and owned their own attention.
“I am nostalgic for a time when I was present, when my generation was between 5 and 10, when we were still doing things in the real world,” shared 19-year-old Nancy, a university student in London, “I don’t remember what I watched yesterday on TikTok, but I remember what I did years ago when I didn’t have a phone.”
“That looked like a better time than today,” she says. That sentiment helps explain why searches for Y2K aesthetics shot up 891% since November 2024.
At a recent sleepover, my 15-year-old son and his 14-year-old friend Charlie, driven by a pang of nostalgia, chose to watch the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics on YouTube. Charlie spoke longingly about a time when he didn’t have a phone. “I felt so free then, not worried about anything like school, just playing. There was no social media. Now I worry about the world, about online hostility and my appearance.”
Nona (25), a marketing professional in London, shares this feeling of nostalgia for the pre-Amazon time of friction and waiting — when slowness felt like breathing room, not failure. This digital nostalgia is unique to the digitally native Gen Z, and alien to previous generations like mine. It centres around what some call the “Tumblr era” [between about 2011 and 2014], when smartphones and apps were still a novelty. “My own son mourns the pre-TikTok YouTube era — when content was shared and discussed rather than endlessly, solitarily scrolled.”
The numbers confirm this is no fringe feeling. Pew Research from 2024 shows that almost half of US 13-17-year-olds (48%) view social media’s effects as mostly negative — up from 32% two years prior — and 44% have actively cut back on smartphone use. Ipsos polling in the UK shows 72% of Britons support an age-verification law barring under-16s from social media, with strong backing from 18-34-year-olds. Deloitte research documents a parallel surge in app deletions and screentime limits among Gen Z themselves.
That pushback against the perceived digital prison is now a market. Analog and “pre-smartphone” experiences — digital detox cabins, phone-free clubs, dumb phones — are scaling fast. Unplugged, the UK’s first digital-detox cabin company, has expanded from a handful of locations in 2020 to over 50 in 2026.
Nona cut her daily screentime from roughly ten hours to two or three after a tech-free Unplugged stay — armed with only a paper map,a Nokia brick phone and her boyfriend’s good company. “[It] made us realize how addicted we are to our phones but also that actually we can very much get away without them,” she says. “It reminded us how much we value undivided attention — and how much our phones steal it.”
According to Vertu research, more and more Gen Z adults are reclaiming their reality by switching to dumb phones or maintaining dual dumb-smartphone setups, and spending more time in tech-free or digitally minimalist spaces. Offline movements like Offline Club (launched in Amsterdam, now in 19 cities) and Luddite Club offer tech-free communities built around presence, not content.
Similarly, apps like Opal help users scale down social media consumption. The category is exploding: the global social-media-blocker app market is projected to grow from $1.47 billion in 2025 to $5 billion by 2035.
Other analog experiences are booming. Escape rooms, paintballing, and live music are all projected to grow considerably through 2035.
Government is catching up. From Australia and France to Denmark, Norway, Malaysia, Indonesia, India’s Karnataka and China, governments worldwide are restricting social media access for minors — accelerating the analog pivot for the next generation.
Gen Z didn’t choose digital overload. They inherited it. But they are now doing something no previous generation has done: deliberately dismantling the attention economy from the inside — one dumb phone, one detox cabin, one conversation, one deleted app at a time. The analog future isn’t a retreat. It’s a correction.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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