More young adults are trading in their smartphones for old-school flip phones, and they say the switch is doing more for their mental health than any app ever did.
“For me, like the second that my iPhone was gone, it was just like heaven on earth,” Kendall Schrohe, a 23-year-old from Washington, D.C. who ditched her iPhone for a flip phone, told CBS News.
Schrohe is part of a small but growing wave of Gen Z adults choosing to unplug from social media altogether, swapping smartphones for dumb phones that can call and text but little else, according to an Aug. 5 report from CBS News MoneyWatch. The shift comes as roughly half of US adults report visiting social media every day, according to 2025 Pew Research Center data, and as the average American teenager spends nearly five hours a day scrolling, according to the American Psychological Association.
“Young people, because we grew up on these platforms, it’s very hard for us to imagine a life where we’re not addicted to it because that has been the norm our entire existence,” Schrohe said.
She said she needed something drastic to break the habit.
“I needed that extreme measure, like to physically not be able to access social media in order to realize, like, that I actually preferred life without it,” Schrohe admitted.
Dr. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician and professor at the University of California, San Francisco who studies how social media affects young people, told CBS News the platforms are built much like the substances people get hooked on.
Related: Are ‘Dumb Phones’ a Practical Way to Break Technology Addiction?
“In teenagers and then even in adults, the sort of features of the design can lead to symptoms similar to substance-related addictions, which can include impaired control, withdrawal, tolerance and relapse,” Nagata said.
He added that people who step away from their phones for good tend to sleep better and think more clearly. Companies like Dumb.co and The Light Phone have built entire businesses around that promise. Dumb.co says it has more than 5,000 active users, most of them women around 24, and the company runs a 30-day Month Offline challenge for people ready to try going without.
The trend arrives months after a March jury verdict found Meta and YouTube liable for designing products that hooked young users on purpose, a ruling that has only added weight to the argument that Silicon Valley engineered this problem in the first place.
Movieguide® has tracked this reckoning for a while now. Last November, Movieguide® reported on social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s warning that Gen Z’s brains are growing hunched around their phone, citing data showing self-harm rates among girls more than quintupled between 2010 and 2015. Back in February, Movieguide® covered Harvard graduate student Gabriela Nguyen, who built a 30-day program called APPstinent after recognizing her own addiction to her phone.
“It is not our fault our childhoods were like this, but it is our responsibility for our own lives and the next generation to use our knowledge for course correction,” Nguyen told Mashable.
Schrohe’s story fits that same pattern: a generation raised inside the machine, waking up to what it costs them, and choosing something better.
“The concept of social media, it’s not like inherently evil. It’s the way it’s designed to keep you on it. That’s like the negative part,” Schrohe said.
Scripture has plenty to say about what happens when good things become the wrong kind of master. Paul told the Corinthians that all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful, and nothing should be allowed to gain control over him (1 Corinthians 6:12). Trading a smartphone for a flip phone isn’t a spiritual discipline on its own, but the instinct behind it, the recognition that a device had begun to own its owner, is one Christian families have been naming for years, long before a jury in California caught up.
“If you feel like you want to change your relationship with technology, like, you can. It really opens up your mind,” Schrohe said.
Read Next: Why Dumb Phones Are Making a Comeback Among Gen Z: ‘Tired’ of Screens
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