This story is based on a conversation with Gabriela Nguyen, 24, a writer, speaker, and founder of the Appstinence movement. It has been edited for length and clarity.
At age 9, I got an iPod Touch, which looked almost exactly like an iPhone. By 10, I got Facebook, my first social media account, and by 12, my first real smartphone. From then on, it was open season on my brain.
I experienced a piecemeal degradation of my life that was hard to notice because I grew up with instant messaging and advanced social media like Instagram reels. I still remember one night, as a 14-year-old freshman in high school, when I was up until 2:30 a.m. trying to finish an assignment. I just kept picking up my phone, scrolling, doing a little bit of work, and then getting distracted again. I really thought it was my fault that I couldn’t focus.
It took me years to realize that my smartphone was the center of gravity around which other things orbit. It set my mood for me in the morning, depending on what my algorithm happened to feed me. It made me more obsessed with myself, curating a perfectly aesthetic feed on Instagram while also disliking myself for doing it. In college, I was in a toxic relationship of deleting apps like Snapchat and TikTok, only to redownload them during a bathroom break.
So, at age 23, I got a Cat S22, an app-compatible flip-phone that was clunkier and less addictive than a smartphone. Right before I turned 24, I transitioned to using a Light Phone, an even more pared-down phone with no internet or social media.
When I stopped being chronically online, I realized how much of my life was spent with a slight buzz in my head, with this absence of peace. While I still own a smartphone and occasionally use it to take photos, it will never be my primary phone again.
It was hard to question social media norms
I grew up in Silicon Valley in the 2000s. It was not the time or place to be skeptical about technology. Many parents were getting their kids into computer science classes, believing technology is the future. Naturally, my peers and I all had the latest tech devices.
At the same time, my dad had different ideas about raising me and my two brothers. A refugee from communist Vietnam, he always had a sensitivity to media messaging. We had a TV for several months when I was a kid, but then he was like, “This is propaganda,” and put it out on the street.
He definitely didn’t want us to have iPhones, but he eventually conceded because of the social pressure around him from our community. Our parents also disagreed on this topic: my mom wanted us to have pretty much all the tech the other kids did, as long as we couldn’t access adult content.
My father’s attitude toward mass media shaped me. I purposely didn’t apply to any schools in California because of how tech-forward everyone was. I felt like people didn’t respect the humanities, so I wanted to study literature at Vassar College in New York.
It did give me some distance from the techno-optimism I grew up with. But the biggest event of my undergrad experience was the pandemic. I celebrated my 19th birthday over Zoom. I had never felt so alone in my life because I was on campus and technically surrounded by people, but I was only interacting with them online.
Then, it dawned on me: The pandemic was just a slightly worse version of how I’d already been living my life.
I noticed how much I wanted to have my life perfectly recorded and for everyone to see what I’m doing. At the same time, I knew I didn’t actually want to be performing all the time, to fixate on my appearance or self-censor out of fear of being misunderstood.
That’s when I decided to try the Cat S22 and to practice what I call “appstinence.”
A richer social life
I used to think that I was really introverted. Before switching to a flip phone, I couldn’t hang out with people for more than two hours. I would just need to go somewhere and check my phone.
I realized I just had such a limited social pattern. Now that I’m off social media, I get sufficient dopamine from in-person interactions.
A question I get asked a lot is how I maintain a social life, when smartphones are such a big part of Gen Zers’ worlds. I think we need to rethink the idea that losing contact with someone is always a bad thing.
In reality, we don’t have unlimited time, energy, or empathy. When I’m not spending time liking people’s Instagram reels, I’m doing other things that I’ve decided are more meaningful for myself, including in-person social interactions. I don’t have compassion fatigue anymore and can actually engage more deeply with the people in my life.
For instance, when I was in grad school at Harvard, I started an organization called Appstinence, becoming friends with other students who wanted to live a more analog lifestyle. It was a very small subset of people at first, but it’s grown. Since graduating in the spring, I’ve connected with similar movements, recently organizing a Delete Day event in New York City, where 80 people deleted social media accounts from their phones.
My experience taught me that the fears of losing friends after cutting out social media are completely overblown. In fact, it’s a misunderstanding of how relationships work. With social media, you could have tons of friends and not feel close to a single one of them.
I see challenges as opportunities
I think there’s something beautiful about life not being perfectly optimized. Recently, on my way to Delete Day, I saw a man sitting at a table near Tompkins Square Park. He said: “If you can tell me three countries to begin with “J,” I’ll give you a prize.”
I could only think of two, and I so badly wanted to look it up. But I waited and asked my friends when I got there, and we still couldn’t figure it out. More people joined in, and we laughed about it. This scenario might not have happened if I had my smartphone.
I also think a lot about the world I want to live in, and I don’t want it to be one where 14-year-old girls Facetune their selfies or feel a looming anxiety because of social media. A lot of the work I do is encouraging the older half of Gen Z, who are just short of 30, to advocate for the younger half of our generation and Gen Alpha.
It’s not their fault that many of them have TikTok brain rot, any more than it was my fault I grew up with a smartphone. But there is something we can all do about it.
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