The Quiet Retreat: Why People Are Stepping Back from Social Media
For the first time since social media was invented, people are using it less.
Not because regulators made them. Not because parental controls finally worked. People are stepping back on their own terms, quietly and individually. Screen time is falling across the developed world. Gen Z is leading it.
That was the starting point for my conversation with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 last week. What we spent the next twenty minutes working through was the more interesting question: if the harm story doesn’t explain the retreat, what does?
In April this year, the Pew Research Center published findings from 1,458 American teenagers active on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. About 70 per cent said their experience on these platforms is mostly positive. Three per cent said mostly negative. Around 60 per cent say social media makes no difference to how they feel about themselves.
The harm story, the one driving legislation, parental alarm, and policy debates across the developed world, does not survive contact with what the people at the centre of it actually report about their own experience.
So the retreat is real. The harm narrative doesn’t account for it. That leaves a more interesting question on the table.
The Numbers Are New
Screen time is declining. This is new, and it matters.
At the end of 2024, DataReportal data showed adults across the developed world spending an average of two hours and twenty minutes per day on social platforms, down almost ten per cent since 2022. That might sound incremental. In practice, it is the first sustained reversal since these platforms were invented. The decline is steepest among the people who used them most: people in their teens and twenties.
The pattern holds across geographies. In the United Kingdom, a Deloitte survey of more than 4,100 people found that nearly a quarter of all consumers had deleted at least one social media app in the previous twelve months. Among Gen Z, that rises to nearly a third. In the United States, about half of Americans cut back on social media use in 2025, according to an American Psychiatric Association poll. More say they plan to reduce further in 2026.
The global Gen Z data is striking on its own terms. Fifty-two per cent attempted to quit social media entirely in 2025. Not did, but attempted, which means that more than half of an entire generation had a moment in the past year where they said: this is too much. Twenty-nine per cent deleted apps altogether. Sixty-one per cent said they wanted less or no social media, citing mental health as the reason. An honest self-report that a generation ten years ago would not have made aloud. More than half support a social media ban for under-sixteens, not a position driven from outside, but one the generation holds about its own experience.
CNBC, reporting in February 2026, called it a quiet revolution: younger people swapping social feeds for lunch dates, vinyl records, and brick phones.
Whatever is happening, it is consistent, cross-cultural, and accelerating.
The Geographic Signal
There is one piece of data I have been sitting with since this conversation with Phil.
Japan spends 47 minutes a day on social media. South Korea, one hour and fourteen minutes. Compare that to Australia at two hours and twenty-seven minutes, or the United States at two hours and sixteen minutes. The United Kingdom sits at one hour and forty-eight minutes.
East Asian markets, with strong in-person social cultures, the izakaya, the shared meal, the public social infrastructure that defines daily connection, were never as captured by the substitute. The platforms filled something in those markets. They filled less, because less needed filling.
The West has further to retreat from because we went further in.
That is not a judgement on either culture. It is a signal about what the platforms were actually doing in contexts where face-to-face connection was harder to come by, or had been disrupted. COVID amplified it sharply. For two years, the alternative to digital social connection was often nothing at all. The platforms weren’t a supplement to life. They were the infrastructure. And when people used them at that level of intensity, they discovered, not immediately and not all at once, what they were and were not actually getting.
When you have had five hundred people like your photo, and you still feel lonely at dinner, the gap between the simulation and the real thing becomes noticeable.
Sufficiency, Not Damage
If the retreat from social media isn’t primarily about harm, what is actually driving it?
The reasons people give when they step back are worth reading carefully. Mental health concerns appear, yes. But so do: “consuming too much of my time,” “wanting to be more present in my relationships,” and “feeling overwhelmed by notification overload.”
That last one is telling. It is not that social media is bad. It is that it has become loud in a way that crowds out other things people value. The problem is not toxicity. The problem is saturation.
This is what I would call a sufficiency signal rather than a damage signal. People are not leaving because they were harmed. They have reached the point where more of the same thing has stopped delivering more of what they were actually looking for. The first bite versus the tenth.
The platforms delivered connection at scale. Just not the version that enough people actually wanted, in quantities that made sense for a human life. Social media was always a substitute for something: the sense of mattering to people who matter to you, the feeling of being known in a room rather than counted in a metric. For a long time, it was the best available version of that. Particularly during COVID, when the alternative was nothing.
But substitutes have a shelf life. At some point the gap between the simulation and the real thing becomes something you can name.
The analog comeback is real and it is not primarily aesthetic. Book clubs are growing, not ironically, but as genuine in-person reading groups where people sit in a room and talk about ideas. Vinyl record sales have increased for eighteen consecutive years. Brick phones, deliberately capability-reduced handsets, are having a commercial moment, particularly among younger buyers who are choosing to reduce what the device can do rather than restrict how they use what it can do.
These are not trends. They are signals about what people want from their time and from connection that the default digital infrastructure is not reliably providing.
The Parent-Teen Gap, and Why the Policy Response May Be Misaimed
The Pew data contains one finding that I think is particularly worth pausing on.
Twenty-eight per cent of teen TikTok users say they spend too much time on the platform. When parents were asked to assess their own teen’s use of TikTok, that number jumps to 44 per cent. About a quarter of parents say social media hurts their teen’s mental health. Only eight per cent of teens themselves agree.
The adults are significantly more alarmed than the kids about the kids’ experience.
I have written before about what happens when adult anxiety about technology gets projected onto children, where the fear is legitimate but the diagnosis gets applied to the wrong patient, producing interventions that miss the actual problem. This data is a case study in that pattern.
The policy responses being built right now (bans, legislative age verification requirements, screen time mandates) are being designed from parental perception, not from what young people report about their own experience. If you are designing a protective system based on the more alarmed group’s assessment rather than the affected group’s direct account, you may be solving the wrong problem.
The TikTok sleep finding is real and significant: about 40 per cent of teen TikTok users say the platform hurts their sleep. That is a meaningful and specific harm worth addressing directly. But it is not the same as the sweeping “social media is destroying our children” narrative. A sleep problem calls for a sleep solution. It does not necessarily warrant legislation that treats the platform as fundamentally dangerous.
What we may actually be watching is a form of what I think of as Past Trauma, Future Anxiety: where adults, rightly concerned about their own complicated relationship with screens and attention and digital overload, project that anxiety onto the next generation as a kind of pre-emptive protection. The concern is legitimate. The diagnosis may be slightly, but significantly, off.
Inhabitable Futures and the Platform Redesign
There is a framework I use in my work with organisations and leadership teams: the idea of Inhabitable Futures, futures that people can actually live in, trust, and thrive inside, rather than futures they are merely surviving or being managed through.
The digital spaces built over the last fifteen years were not, in the main, particularly inhabitable. They were stimulating, occasionally wonderful, genuinely useful for real tasks. But they were designed for engagement, not for wellbeing. For attention capture, not for genuine connection. For the metrics that sustain the platform’s revenue model, not for the outcomes that serve the person using it.
What we are watching now, in the retreat data, in the Gen Z numbers, in the vinyl and book clubs and brick phones, is people beginning, quietly and without a manifesto, to redesign their own relationship with those spaces. Choosing what is inhabitable over what is addictive. Rebuilding the conditions for the thing the platforms were substituting for.
That is not anti-technology. It is, in fact, a more mature relationship with technology than the one that produced fifteen years of maximum engagement at any cost. It is what happens when a generation looks at a platform and asks: what do I actually want from connection, and is this tool delivering it?
The platforms are reading the signal. TikTok’s recommendation engine, which once optimised purely for watch time, has introduced features that encourage users to close the app. Instagram has added screen break prompts. These are not acts of corporate altruism. They are platforms trying to get ahead of a regulatory wave while also managing user attrition. But they also signal something important: the model of maximum engagement has hit its natural limit. Even the people operating the platforms can see that the current mode of use has stopped delivering what people actually came for, and that unsustainable experience eventually becomes unsustainable business.
This is what I’ve written about in the context of platform obsolescence: the risk that comes not from being disrupted by a competitor, but from ceasing to deliver what people actually came for. When a platform starts telling you to put it down, you are watching the early design of the next version of the thing. The question worth asking is whether that redesign will happen from within, or whether people will simply route around it.
Three Things Worth Doing With This
The first thing to do is separate the harm signal from the sufficiency signal. They are different problems requiring different responses. The harm signal (sleep disruption, specific experiences of anxiety, documented negative patterns in particular cohorts) calls for targeted, evidence-based interventions. The sufficiency signal, the broader retreat driven by people quietly deciding the platforms weren’t delivering what they came for, calls for something more structural: asking what conditions actually produce belonging, and what role technology plays in those conditions. If you conflate the two, you will build systems optimised for the wrong problem.
The second thing to do is look at your own organisation’s communication through this lens. The same recalibration that is pulling people away from TikTok and Instagram is arriving in how people relate to organisational content. People are increasingly tired of communication optimised for reach rather than for meaning: content that performs engagement without delivering substance. If your organisation is publishing at volume and measuring success by impressions, you may be on the wrong side of a shift that is already underway. The question worth asking is not “how much are we reaching people?” but “when we reach them, is it worth it to them?”
The third thing to do is pay attention to what the analog signals are actually telling you. Vinyl. Book clubs. Brick phones. These are not nostalgic gestures. They are data about human needs that the digital layer was supposed to meet, and didn’t, reliably. Where you see sustained reversals like this (eighteen consecutive years of vinyl growth is not a fad) you are looking at a population working out what was missing, and finding other ways to get it. That tells you something about what needs to be built next. Not a return to the past. A forward-designed version of what the past was getting right.
What Phil Said on Air
Phil Whelan is a careful listener. He has been hosting The Morning Brew on RTHK Radio 3 for a long time, and he has a quality I find genuinely useful: he does not try to make a topic mean something before he has heard the evidence.
When I walked through the Pew findings, his first response was not “so we were all wrong.” It was more grounded than that. His framing: social media has gone through its candy store phase. Exciting, then addictive, then ordinary. People are now calibrating to what it actually delivers. Not catastrophe. Not triumph. Maturation.
He raised a stat I want to make sure does not get lost: 61 per cent of Gen Z said they wanted less or no social media. For mental health reasons. That figure is striking, not because it confirms harm (most of them don’t report feeling harmed), but because it tells you something more interesting. They have enough self-awareness to know they want a different relationship with these platforms. They are not leaving because they are damaged. They are leaving because they are paying attention.
Phil also brought in the Australian sports angle, which is concrete and specific. Youth demand for in-person sport is now outstripping capacity across multiple codes. AFL, basketball, cricket, Oz Tag. The codes cannot keep up. That is not an accident. It is a population of young people, many of whom grew up primarily online, choosing to be somewhere physical, doing something that requires other people to be in the same room. The data and the lived experience are telling the same story from different directions.
There was one specific moment during the broadcast worth noting here. Phil pulled up a reference while we were on air: a note suggesting the push for Australia’s under-16 social media ban was largely sparked by state-level political action after a particular politician’s spouse read Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. I won’t editorialise heavily on that. Haidt’s argument is worth engaging with seriously. But it does illustrate the broader pattern: a significant part of the policy response to social media is being driven by adult anxiety, projected outward. The Pew data does not support the most alarmed version of that story.
Phil’s framing near the end of the segment was the one that stayed with me. He called it a life sine wave. A trend kicks in, runs its course, and quietly recedes. And his summary of the Pew findings: the people somewhere were expecting catastrophe, and the kids came back with: we’re okay. Treat us with respect. Teach us good habits. You invented this stuff, not us.
That is the line I keep returning to.
The quiet retreat from social media is not a failure of technology. It is technology reaching a natural maturation point: people beginning to treat platforms as tools rather than defaults, asking what they are actually delivering, and choosing differently when the answer disappoints.
The story the data tells is not a harm story. It is a belonging story. What we built for connection turned out to be a very efficient substitute for connection. Substitutes have a shelf life. At some point the gap between what was promised and what was delivered becomes visible. And people, not dramatically and not with a manifesto, but quietly, start looking for something closer to the real thing.
The platforms that survive the recalibration won’t be the ones that held attention longest. They will be the ones that made connection feel worth staying for.
This post is based on my segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, 9 June 2026.
Sources: Pew Research Center (April 2026); DataReportal / GWI Digital 2026; Deloitte UK Consumer Trends Survey 2025; American Psychiatric Association poll 2025; CNBC February 2026; Axios May 2026.
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Full Segment Transcript: RTHK Radio 3, The Brew, 9 June 2026
Transcript generated by Whisper AI from the original broadcast audio. Minor transcription errors may be present. Phil Whelan (host) and Morris Misel (guest).
Yeah, yeah, that is a decent song in a half Jason’s Rulo and George 685 and it’s called Make Me Happy and why not for a Tuesday I’ve had a nice surprise this morning because I thought Morris was going off on tour, but he said he’s not so welcome back Morris. How are you? Good to be back happy Tuesday You’ve actually Excuse me, come along with a really cool topic today. It’s pretty relevant all round So why don’t you introduce it? I think it is a little good to see it’s a topic that’s fascinating for all of us We talk a lot about it, especially in the press and Australia. I assume around the world and that is how much time We children anybody spends online and I hear a constant diet drive of we’re spending so much time online There’s no physical activity people. You know, there are either going square or all those things We said about television in the old days seem to have participated in this but research I mean real hard statistic research is showing in fact Stransly enough that we’re spending less time online than we ever have before since we invented the thing Yeah, absolutely well, it’s not us really that’s getting the light shown on us So you were allowed to tell me your opinion about the under 16 thing in Aussie for starters Yeah, sure I can so we’re talked about this before I mean Australia brought in law last year, which said that anyone under 16 was not allowed to be online and They then made it mandatory that most of the big players the Facebooks all those kinds of things had to make sure the young children under 16 couldn’t have accounts I said to you at the time I wrote about it a lot. I didn’t think it was particularly credible I didn’t think it was pitickly doable. It would work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s not it’s not the notion that they shouldn’t be I’m not running against that. It’s just that it’s an old person. I put me in that realm an old person’s view Of how you stop something if you don’t want the horse to get out you shut the gate. Yeah, you bet that that doesn’t work You can’t shut the gate. The horse is also going to kick and try and get out in the village
we’ll get out and find ways around it. And that’s what I think is happening here. Strangely enough and it’s not at all, it’s gone too quiet. I’ve not heard because it’s not always shocking all that they thought it was perhaps going to be. But does anything, on any level whatsoever, I’ve not seen anything written about how different our people have become because of it. I’ve not seen anything written or any stats which tell me credibly how many children are not on it and what they’re doing instead. So I think the law in its intent is wonderful. It is because humans, parents, grandparents want to make sure the kids are safe, doesn’t matter where they are, physical or statistically Morris are most kids pretty okay really, statistically. I think they are. I truly think they are. What we’ve done is we’ve given them some worlds to look and something else to do. There are downfalls to it, but there are also great bones to have given them a world of likes of which has never been seen before. You and I talk about horrible humans all the time using it for good and for evil. Those things don’t change in this space. Yes, there are things we can do better, but I don’t think it’s a sinster as we make out. And there’s humans and especially in the media generally. It’s far easier to write the story about that 001% and get a rise. Good people to talk about it and about the 99.9% of people who do wonderful things every day, day in, day out. And it’s not spectacular. It’s going on with their lives really in a great time and doing stuff. Let’s step back to this report. Now we always can be a bit cynical about research and reports and surveys, because very often they’re pins to a product. They’re pins to a company’s, you know, overriding key blah blah blah blah. So the Pew Research Centre Morris tell us a bit about these guys. I mean, I like Pew on PW. They’ve been around for a very long time. They’re American-based, but their research is very deep. It’s cultural. It really isn’t tied to a particular product. They’ve used them a lot for religion. Over the decades they’ve charted how various groups around the world have risen or not how many people go to church. How many people do things? They’ve always looked at them.
up the culture. And I’ve believed that statistics are as good as anybody else. So PUPW came out with the brilliant stream report and they’ve tracked this forever again, going back to social media start. The what they’ve said is in the latest series of report and then I’ve gone ahead and I’ve checked through a whole lot of other research and of course you can always find research that will agree with what you say but it’s interesting now to see how much research there is that actually pushes in the other direction, being that what PUPW has found that since social media has come about which is roughly like 2007, 2008, depending when, so nearly 20 years of social media for the first time ever at the end of 2024, early 2025, the average adult spend online across the world is 2 hours and 20 minutes, which is down 10%, down 10%, and we’ve never seen a down figure across the world in social media before. So basically, to cut a long story short, have they sort of found that young people are not going into the nine circles of hell, they’re actually just watching people dancing and stuff on TikTok and TikTok and actually, you know, it’s really not as crazy as they would have to believe, is that what they have, they’ve really found that what’s happened is I’ve used analogy many, many times, electricity and gas, really excited in the beginning, it’s candy store, whatever analogy one you use, people are gorging themselves, loving it and we’re here in good and bad, it’s become ordinary now, 20 years on social media is just there, I mean just let’s just get over it and what we’re finding now is that people have found a balance, they’re either using it or they’re not using it, they’re either in it or they’re out of it, they’re no longer excited by it, we don’t really see a part from this big AI push the last two or three years, we don’t see bigger announcements anymore and people hurting into spaces, because those days are kind of gone, the equilibrium is here, we have made the choice, we haven’t made the choice we do.
we double out. But what they’ve also found is that the group that most are most blamed for being in this space, the young ones, are in fact by statistic. Keep you and from Deloitte and from a whole lot of other ones I’ve found are the ones who are actually making conscious choices not to be there. A couple of questions. Well I suppose the main question for me and Aussie is, what actually kick this off? Is there any specific thing that happened? I mean, I know really nasty things do, but from listening to you and other people and reading this it seems that, on average, people are pretty sensible, young people. Look, I think people are sensible anyway. I think they always have been. The reality is that we, that we over engineer over think and over speak about many of these downsides, which of course should not be hidden away. But at some point, but at some point we have to teach good habits. And to me that’s more important. We have to make things culturally normal or abnormal. In other words, say as a culture, we accept that we don’t accept these are the rules, the ways we provide, these are the ways you use. And it’s more important that we do that than banning of it and saying no and screaming from a poor, but I mean of any religion, that’s not a religious comment, but speaking from the poor but whether that’s politicians or our older people or wise or whatever else. It’s it’s really interesting because what we’re seeing and I’m experiencing this across my audiences and also in the boardrooms as well is I’m seeing people are not engaged with apps in the way they used to. They will and it’s not unusual now to hear from anybody. I haven’t been on that. That might be Facebook or it might be Twitter or it might be LinkedIn. I hadn’t been on that for six or 12 months. I haven’t actually looked there. I don’t even think I have got it anymore. And what we’re finding through Google search and through a lot of those Google plays where people download their apps onto their mobile phones is that people are actually deleting an app or two, not all of them, not going crazy, but just deleting an app or two and the stats hold it up really strongly. See when they talk.
about the rule in Australia. Of course I keep coming back because that’s where that’s where you are. But I’m curious. So we hear about the miners, which they are, did parents have a sort of on mass say, don’t insult us, because you’re insulting us with this. Did parents say that? Yeah. I mean, was there ever a feeling from parents that you know, you’re saying we’re bad parents? We can’t sort of look after our kids. I haven’t seen another thing. I haven’t seen that before, but I think in some ways it is what came out behind the scenes in all of this, you know, thing that we had before the legislation came in, I actually sided with parents. I think parents should be allowed to parent at some point. It’s not up to the point. Of course it does. I mean, of course this is a massive generalisation, but most just do. Absolutely. And we do need to support parents and it does need to be structure in place. All those things are there, but at some point, at some point, we need to let our kids have a bruise. I mean, that’s how we grew up. I’m not saying we want them to hurt themselves. But if I need to experience we need to show them, we need to tell them, we need to advise them. And our kids are so much clever, so much smarter, so much whyser, then we generally give them credit for what we found in these stats again was the Gen Z. 52% of Gen Z attempted to quit social media entirely, attempted, not did, but attempted, which means there was a conversation that over half of Gen Z had, which said at some point in that year, this is too much. I just want to get off with, I just really want to get away from the screen and I want to have downtime. And I’m seeing that, for instance, in my travel clients who are having people travel now as detox, who are doing things to get away from screens, who have a sabbatical, in other words, a day or a week, an hour, a month, a year or whatever away from it. So it actually does trend out. And the Gen Z also, which I love, I mean, I think it’s such an honest comment from them, generally, 61% in this research said that they wanted to…
have less or no social media, 61% because it for mental health reasons. You wouldn’t have said that 10 years ago, certainly. When you said, would not have announced openly as they should be able to look, this thing is actually doing me harm. I don’t feel like I should when I’m on it and have enough now, not to get off. They haven’t said that they’ve left the street, but they’ve had, they’ve had a thought. Something in the head has said, this is not what it should be, and I’ve done at least think about not being on 61%. That’s a great figure if it is. Morris, can you grab your phone? I just sent you a screenshot. I’d like you to explain if you could sort of answers my question. I am grabbing as we speak. I am grabbing as we speak. I asked about the sort of something that was over a week ago. Was there a big thing that happened in Australia? I mean, what I’ve just sent you? Was that nonsense or was it true? Have a look? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t, I would just call it his first though. So you said they’re the push for Australia’s under 16 social media ban was largely sparked by state-level political action from South Australian Premier, Peter Melanarkis, after his wife for a Jonathan Hades book, The Anxious Generation. Look, the book I’m aware of and it’s, and it certainly did it. How do you know what caused anything? I would not be surprised if something like that may be pushed into mainstream. Our policies, I don’t need to forgive me if things. Our policies are no brighter than we are. Sometimes they’re not. They’re very single-fighting. You should have been my choice, and I bet at some stage in your career you nearly were. Yeah, I nearly were. I’ve met many. I’ve worked with many around the globe. They are wonderful human beings, but they are very single-fighters and single-minded. I take nothing away from them. They’re no better than the rest of us, it’s seeing a broader aspects. It might have taken somebody’s wife to actually say, hey, look over here, it’s a wing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So back to the research, it’s on a cycle of the white hater. The final paragraph is quite interesting, because no.
No surprise is here when you read in the end, the Pew Research does not give us a simple answer, and that is actually its greatest strength that reminds us that when it comes to youth, teams, and their use of technology, the reality is really simple, it’s nuanced, it’s evolving, and it requires us, as adults, to meet it with the same level of thoughtfulness. There you go. Hello, I mean, to me and that’s it, and life doesn’t have black and white. I have no idea why we want social media, we’re nothing else in our life does. There’s good and there’s bad purposes for it. Again, I don’t love stats, but I think these stats are so nice, it speaks about this. We talk about teenagers, 40% of them who realize that TikTok hurts their team’s sleep. That’s at least at least some kind of a comment that they know these things. Again, I’m not acting necessarily, but they know these things. Only 28% think that they’ve spent too much time on TikTok, which we would expect, but most of that comes from adults, not from children, and the other thing that I love, which I think you’ll love also, in the same research, because it talks about not only what they don’t do, it talks about what they do instead, and it talks about them going out, and playing, playing more sports, it talks about them going out, and actually joining clubs, it talks about reading more. Why would they do this noise, because essentially, being young people, they’re just a bit tired of it, also, they want to do something else, which is, go back to your own screen, which is not on screen, and that’s his figure that I want to share with you, in the pew and research, it says vinyl record sales. Oh, yeah. Have grown up, have grown year on year for 18 years now. Don’t encourage Jared with vinyl talk, because I’m just going to get, I’m going to get it after the news. I think that’s wonderful, because it speaks to exactly what you and I’ve said for years and years, and everybody else, I think, knows deep down, and that is, at some point, you just feel overwhelmed by all these digital stuff, and you don’t need to be told more than 12 times, get off and go into the sunshine, and kids do, they just do, not everybody, not everybody.
As a kid’s program in the 1970s, I think, a long, long time ago, and it was a long, sort of bunch of letters, and it was, why don’t you switch off your television set and go and do something else instead? So even back then, that’s what they were saying. And you get these really crazy names, so in Pinterest, then, and all other places, which I think is hysterical, where a lot of them are on, and they’re showing TikTok has a lot of these too, where they’re actually showing them deleting an app. So it’s an app telling everybody else, how they’re deleting apps, and they’re getting them. I think it’s hysterical, because that makes no sense to me. At some point, it’s sort of circular thing. But I still like the notion of it that they’re actually speaking to each other and saying, yeah, yeah, I like you on this app. I want you to keep watching me on it. But I’m going to show you how I’m actually deleting apps in other places. Have we just gone on a circle of life thing here? A life sine wave, where a trend kicks in, and then, several years later, it just quietly goes away. It does. What else do you think? I absolutely think we have with social media, because it becomes so ordinary that there’s just, unless there’s a purpose, unless you turn on the light, or need to cook something in the main other analogies, you’re just not on it. It just doesn’t make sense. Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. Then we board with all the great gadgets and stuff. And then people, because they started to dwell into it. We’re done it to death. But the problem is that people of our edge might just still back talking about the old days when we were trying to get people off it. So it’s back to when the Beatles were going to cause us harm. But now we all listen to the Beatles and we think it’s nostalgia and romantic, and the best thing that was ever put out. It’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, we always talk about techies stuff, because it’s kind of fun, and it’s what you do. But more and more, we’ve been talking about habits. I think we’ve just lived a paradigm. Yeah, we have. We absolutely have. And the stats again, I use the only that, because I’ve said it for years. Other people said it for years. When you start to see global numbers, which actually back up a lot of this, I’m hoping the conversation hits a bit harder. The people are living physical lives, kids are going out and playing sports. In Australia, most sports codes cannot keep.
And that’s not an exaggeration. Cannot keep up with the youth demand. Playing Fully, our AFL, Ozcick, Ozcick, is just oversubscribed in a great way. Basketball, basketball fields are just overcrowded with. Ironically, Maris, what was made the mind allows sporting people being on their own? Is that what? But it has, but then they translate that. We’ll see, we’ve always assumed, wrongly, they didn’t translate it. Watching it on their phone or whatever they were doing, it was enough for them, but it didn’t. It actually did what humans do. It spurred some, not all. But a lot of them, I’m like, I’m like, I pick up a ball and see if I can do that. Tell you what, Maris, we just got a few seconds left here. Something on TikTok. We just got a few seconds left here, but it’s quite interesting. Yeah. I guess some people somewhere were expecting, oh my god, the kids, and the answer from the kids is like, me, we’re okay. Yeah, exactly. We’re okay. We’re okay, just treat us, okay. It teaches what we need to do, not gonna say this to us, but treat us what we need to do. It teaches us about the world. And while you’re doing that, you can’t even incorporate some of this new stuff. And you gotta remember, you invented the stuff, not me. I mean, I didn’t come out of the womb and say here’s a tablet. You gave it to me when I came out. Right, responsible. Teach me how to use it. So actually, are you away late this week? Cause you said you were gonna be? No, no, I’m here. Okay, cause actually, it wasn’t meant to be away this week. Anyway, Maris, I’m glad we had a chance to catch up. Say hello to T-Kildafaurus and catch you very soon. Brilliant, mate. Super duper. Maris, miss a lousky life from Aussie. Gerard’s on the way in a few minutes with some great tunes for you, especially chosen and hand-picked and stuff. So let’s have a look at the weather. Cloudy, few showers, moderate north and north, westly winds. It’s gonna be brighter in the next couple of days. Yay. And there will still be a few showers. Who? A few showers and thunderstorms on Saturday. And it’s all gonna kick off next week. 26 Celsius at the moment. And we have 78% relative humidity.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is social media actually harming teenagers?
The picture is more complex than the dominant harm narrative suggests. Pew Research Center’s April 2026 study of 1,458 US teenagers found that 70% report their social media experience as mostly positive, with only 3% saying mostly negative. However, 40% of teen TikTok users report the platform hurts their sleep — a specific, meaningful harm worth addressing directly. The key distinction is between targeted harms (sleep disruption, anxiety in specific cohorts) and the broader “social media is destroying our children” framing, which the data does not consistently support.
Why are people stepping back from social media if it’s not causing harm?
The retreat is better understood as a sufficiency signal than a damage signal. People are not primarily leaving because they were harmed — they are leaving because the platforms reached a point of satiation, delivering diminishing returns on what people actually wanted from them: genuine connection, the sense of mattering to people who matter to you. The reasons people give include “consuming too much of my time,” “wanting to be more present,” and “notification overload” — saturation, not toxicity.
What is the Inhabitable Futures framework?
Inhabitable Futures is a framework Morris Misel uses in his work with organisations and leadership teams. It refers to futures that people can actually live in, trust, and thrive inside — as distinct from futures they are merely surviving, being managed through, or adapting to under duress. Applied to digital spaces, an inhabitable platform is one designed for genuine connection and wellbeing, not purely for engagement metrics or attention capture. The current retreat from social media is, in part, people beginning to redesign their digital lives around what is actually inhabitable for them.
What does the difference in social media use between East Asia and Western countries tell us?
Japan spends 47 minutes a day on social media compared to Australia’s 2 hours 27 minutes and the US’s 2 hours 16 minutes. This geographic difference is a signal about what the platforms were filling in different contexts. East Asian markets with strong in-person social cultures — the shared meal, robust public gathering infrastructure — were never as dependent on digital substitutes for connection. The West has further to retreat from because digital platforms filled a larger gap, particularly amplified by COVID when face-to-face connection was severely restricted.
What should organisations do in response to the social media retreat?
Three things. First, separate the harm signal from the sufficiency signal — they require different responses. Second, examine your own organisation’s communication through this lens: the same recalibration pulling people away from TikTok is arriving in how people relate to organisational content. Publishing at volume and measuring by impressions may place you on the wrong side of a shift already underway. Third, pay attention to what analog signals — vinyl, book clubs, brick phones — are telling you about unmet human needs, because those needs indicate what should be built or redesigned next.
About Morris Misel
Morris Misel is a foresight strategist and keynote speaker based in Melbourne, Australia. With 30+ years of experience working with leaders, boards, associations, and organisations across Australia and internationally, Morris helps people prepare for uncertainty, interpret signals, and make better strategic choices.
His work is grounded in several proprietary frameworks including HUMAND (a decision model for human-machine-AI work allocation), PTFA (Past Trauma, Future Anxiety), Ripple Effects (second and third-order consequence mapping), and Immediate Futures (what is already arriving and needs attention now).
Morris speaks regularly on the future of work, leadership in uncertainty, AI strategy, and organisational foresight. He is a regular guest on RTHK Radio 3 (Hong Kong) and has appeared across Australian and international media.
Learn more: morrisfuturist.com | morrismisel.com
