It doesn’t take much searching online to find people talking about how social media use is down 10% from 2022, when platforms were at their peak. Obviously, social media is always going to be a big part of our lives (I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon), but will this trend continue, with more people detoxing and disconnecting in 2026?
The generation that I’m most interested in right now is the one that comes after Gen Z… Gen Alpha. Will the kids born today be the generation that rejects social media?
There’s a movement I’ve been seeing lately where Gen Z is beginning to detox from social media. We’ve always known that social media has negative effects on the people who use it, but it’s starting to feel like society is rejecting its constant use as we become more conscious of what a social media detox can do for our mental health.
Gen Alpha right now is between the ages of 1 and 16. This generation has grown up completely surrounded by internet culture, which I believe could be the reason they start to value disconnecting. Their entire lives have been documented from birth, and they’ve watched the mental health toll on the two generations before them. The internet was a novelty to Millennials and Gen Z. Gen Alpha hasn’t known a world without it, making real-life experiences and smaller communities feel more novel to them.
Social Media Isn’t Social, Rawdog Boredom Instead
When the first iPhone came out in June of 2007, people didn’t realize how much it would change the way we communicate on the internet. In the 2010s, we became more connected than ever. There was this brand new app called Instagram where nothing was curated, people tweeted what they were doing no matter if it was interesting or not, and Snapchat was taking over college campuses (sending explicit photos in more ways than one).
Remember what they took from us.
Most of who we followed were friends, family, and people we knew outside of the internet. Now everything is curated to exactly what the algorithms know we want to consume, and we rarely see posts from friends or family.
There was an entire world before all of this connectivity. We had to go outside and communicate with people in the real world. There’s been this trend where Gen Z has been rawdogging boredom or just doing nothing to regain their attention span (call it whatever you want, it’s just another way people are detoxing). Gen Alpha has hindsight. They’ve seen how hard we’ve been trying to disconnect over the last five years. Will they be the first generation to truly disconnect?
The Big Takeaway
Social media isn’t going away, but behavior is starting to shift. Gen Z is already experimenting with disconnecting, and Gen Alpha is growing up fully aware of the downsides of being online all the time. The internet isn’t novel anymore, it’s expected, which could make constant connectivity feel less appealing to the next generation. The real question isn’t whether social media declines, it’s whether Gen Alpha grows up choosing something different altogether.
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