A smarter life? Meet the Gen-Zers who are switching off their smartphones

Irish Times

3 days ago

It's not easy to catch Jack Brocklebank on his smartphone. The 23-year-old often lets his battery die, or abandons the phone somewhere in his house. If he makes an appointment to meet someone, the
Trinity
graduate sticks to it: no changing. 'My mam laughs at me,' he says. 'It's like back in the day when there was only a phone box. Once I have a plan, I am committed. It's like, 'Call me once. Make the plan and I'll show up. If you're not there, I'm not going to get your text.''
Like a growing number of people his age, Brocklebank is making an active choice to downgrade his use of phones and
social media
. He took the decision following
Covid
when his screen time rocketed. 'I was on screens 14-16 hours a day,' he says. 'I would have been on Zooms until three o'clock every morning. I used to have 100-and-something Snapchat streaks, of people I would text every day. I wasn't going for walks. I wasn't sleeping. I'm only now readjusting.'
Did his phone use feel like an addiction? 'It's entirely addictive,' he says. 'There can be withdrawals. Like, I would get very irritable, very snappy, very short-tempered ... Say I were to go off my phone for four hours, and then if I went back on and I didn't have a text or a notification, I'd do something like post on Instagram, so I'd be like, 'Oh people are liking that, they still care.' And if that wasn't getting as many likes, you'd have to delete it, and then stop on your phone for a few days. I was caught in this vicious cycle.'
These days, things are very different. 'I'm on my phone less and I'm happier,' he says. 'I'm not going, 'Oh, do people think I'm good-looking on
Instagram
?' Or, 'Do my friends care about me?' I'm also spending more time with them in person. Even my mam is on the phone more than me. My phone did have a lot of power over me, but at this point it could just go missing.'
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Back in the early days of smartphones, there was a sense of excitement about the possibilities the technology could bring: that the internet could democratise opportunity and offer access to information almost instantaneously. Now in its place has come a widespread unease. Educators report that young people, used to gamified social media, struggle to focus at school. Phones have a zombifying effect where people scroll but can't remember, once they put the phone down, what they've been watching. There is a greater understanding that algorithms are driving the content people see.
'Your attention is a currency,' says Garret Nugent, an 18-year-old secondary school student from Dublin, who has also decided to restrict his use of social media. 'I realised if my attention was valuable to companies, I should pay more attention to where I was putting it.'
Now coming into his Leaving Cert year, Nugent has deleted
TikTok
and keeps a tight rein on his screen time. 'I got rid of a lot of apps,' he says. 'TikTok is marketed as a way of relaxing, but it's not relaxing. You feel hollow.'
Nugent first got a smartphone at 13, having been given a flip-phone around the age of 10. A keen musician, it wasn't long after he started using social media that he realised his piano and harp playing was suffering owing to the time he was spending scrolling. He decided to wrest back control after he'd been home sick from school and spent the whole day on TikTok.
'It was outrageous,' he says. 'I spent 11 hours on TikTok. I would have been 14 or 15.' What was he watching? 'The worst part is you don't really remember. There was a lot of Minecraft. I got a lot of 'fun fact' ones, like about 'Oh, this guy invented penicillin.' Comedy sketches were very common.'
Garret Nugent: 'It was outrageous. I spent 11 hours on TikTok'
Nugent's smartphone usage these days is considered. 'It's about deciding what you're using your phone for,' he says. 'I'd rather watch videos I choose of something I'm interested in than spending hours scrolling things, barely deciding to watch them.' Factoring in the use of pragmatic apps such as Google Maps, Nugent's screen time is around three hours a day. 'For the moment, I feel like I have things in a solid place,' he says. 'I'm comfortable with how I'm using my phone.'
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Social media is destroying young people's mental health. Why do we keep tiptoeing around this reality?
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It takes a certain maturity to be able to zoom out and look at your life online with such critical appraisal. It's also indicative of a new generation of young people who are feeling the burn from their phones, and want to control their smartphone usage to improve their mental health and deepen their attention spans.
According to a recent report by GWI, a research institute which surveyed the views of 20,000 young people and their parents across 18 countries, the number of 12- to 15-year-olds who take breaks from their smart screens rose by 18 per cent to 40 per cent since 2022. Another survey conducted by the British Standards Institution found that
almost half of young people said they would rather live in a world
where the internet did not exist.
Are young people scared of their smartphones? That might be a stretch, but there is certainly a growing degree of caution among some.
Nuala Whittle, a 26-year-old masters student from Co Wicklow now living in Berlin, is still on Instagram, but has a timer set to go off after 30 minutes to remind her of how long she's using it every day. She's wary about the messaging that comes to her via social media apps, particularly in relation to body image. 'My main source of weight questioning came from a really early age from Instagram and Tumblr,' she says. 'At the time, I was too young to realise how damaging that would be.'
What did she see? Whittle reels off the video and picture messaging that would flash up on her feed. 'Tips for 'here's how you can go your whole day without fainting'. And, 'here's how you can keep it under 100 calories per day'. Or 'here's how you should make up for the green apple you ate'. That was mostly Instagram. At the time they had a caveat saying, 'you might see some harmful images'. Of course when you're 16, you're like, 'I want to see the harmful images. I'm big and mature.' You look at it with a morbid fascination, but there's a part of you that's like, should I be paying attention to this?'
Nuala Whittle: 'When you're 16, you're like, I want to see the harmful images – I'm big and mature'
Whittle didn't talk to her friends and family about what she was witnessing. 'You just kept it to yourself,' she says. 'You never spoke to friends about whether they were going down the same rabbit holes, or acting on the things they saw.'
A private unease built up in Whittle. 'I saw a lot of very graphic self-harm content. I was like, 'Should I be seeing this?' And you never say it. Because when I was growing up, we didn't have the same awareness of the fact that images are marketed to people. And depending on what demographic you are, you get a certain type of content. Your age is dictating a lot.'
Whittle now tries hard to restrict her Instagram use, but still regularly hits two hours a day on the app. She feels the marketing targeted at her has changed as she has grown older. 'When I was young, it was weight-based. Now it's this trend towards anti-ageing. My current marketing is a lot of Botox and filler and tweakments and 'here's these tiny things that you can do to not age any more than this'. I'm also seeing a lot of celebrities, and 'here's a breakdown of what they have had done'. When I was in New York, I saw girls of 10 or 12 in Sephora looking at anti-ageing products. Because now the marketing is 'prevention is the best cure, you have to start early'. They were in these brightly lit make-up chairs, dissecting their faces.'
Young girls can be seriously impacted by social media use. In a
2025 survey by social enterprise the Shona Project
, 52 per cent of teenage girls said filters and editing apps negatively affect their self-esteem.
But teenage boys face profound challenges too. 'I had stealthily censored pornographic images pop up on my Instagram when I was in my early teens,' says Tadhg McLoughlin, a 23-year-old from Clondalkin in Dublin. 'It would be accounts run by OnlyFans models where they'd post themselves dancing and then you'd go to a profile, and it would be like, 'Click my link'. Two years ago, I had really explicit, pornographic images pop up on my 'For you' page on TikTok. I reported it. With kids and teens, there's a lot of preying on morbid curiosity.'
A student of screenwriting in Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, McLoughlin has spent years trying to restrict his social media use, with some successes and failures. 'I've been trying to get off the phone, particularly social media,' he says. 'I deleted TikTok for three months and then my girlfriend was giving out that she couldn't send my TikToks so I redownloaded it, but I think I'm going to delete it again. The content is horrible. I don't remember half the stuff I see.'
Tadhg McLoughlin: 'I think I'm going to delete Tiktok again. The content is horrible.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
Even when young people try to get off their smartphones, invariably they wind up back on them again, their hand forced by the demands of the modern world. Ita Mac Carthy is mother to 13-year-old Sandy. 'Sandy got rid of his smartphone for a flip-phone for a good six months,' she explains. 'We reintroduced the smartphone when he went on a school trip abroad so we could contact him by
WhatsApp
, and now he's on Instagram. I'm not sure how long he'll keep Instagram or his smartphone: they don't make him happy and he knows it.'
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Smartphones are an easy scapegoat for a more profound unhappiness
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Trying to reduce screen time is like playing a game of Whac-a-Mole: once you put the phone away, a compelling reason pops up to use it – you might need WhatsApp for a video call with family abroad, Revolut to pay someone for gig tickets or to split a restaurant bill, the camera to scan a QR code, or even email just to keep up with homework. 'My school uses Teams, Microsoft Word, the whole Microsoft package,' Nugent says. 'I also need my smartphone for navigation: I use Google Maps a lot.'
Two-factor identification messages ping in while you're already using a screen: a laptop. 'I was applying for my driving licence and it kept sending me text verifications,' Brocklebank says. 'Banking is one of the main things. You have to run after your phone to send confirmations.'
Can so-called dumbphones – the app-less, old-fashioned mobile phones – help? Not really, the young people interviewed for this article report. Smartphones are designed to be central to our lives and inseparable from our person. We need them to function in the modern world.
According to research firm Data Insights Analysis, sales of dumbphones will decline by 1.3 per cent in 2025. 'I wish I could live comfortably with a 2007 flip-phone,' McLoughlin says. 'Ideally I would just have calls and texts and maybe a camera for pictures, or email. But I just don't see things going that way, where that's even a possible choice, because of the culture we live in.'
FOMO, or the fear of missing out
, is a large part of what forces people back on to smartphones and social media: WhatsApp and
Facebook
groups can be vital for our social or work lives. There's a secondary aspect too: the craving most of us have for the warm, fuzzy feeling of validation that comes with social media usage – with the likes, reposts and thumbs up – and the pinpricks of insecurity if we aren't online.
Brocklebank would get upset sometimes if he went offline for a time, only to find a low number of unread messages waiting for him when he logged back on to social media. 'It was, 'Am I still friends with that person?'' he says. 'I was so sure they didn't like me.'
Jack Brocklebank: 'My phone did have a lot of power over me.' Photograph: Tom Honan
In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, American social psychologist
Jonathan Haidt explores
how smartphones fuel insecurity and encourage constant social comparison among young people. Haidt believes great structural strides must be taken – by placing responsibility on governments and technology companies – to protect young people from their smartphones. Many Irish professionals working in education and mental health agree.
'It's causing mayhem in our school and I'm sure in lots of other schools that are not discussing it because we're caught between a rock and a hard place because of confidentiality,' says Mary*, a primary schoolteacher in Munster. 'We've seen first-hand the impact it's having on very young children after Holy Communion when they're being given access to mobile phones. It's impacting their mental health, their social interactions. We were saying in school it should be a Department of Health not a Department of Education topic because of the impact it's having.'
Countries including France, the Netherlands, Italy and Luxembourg have introduced school-wide bans on phones during the day. Earlier this summer, the Department of Education stopped short of banning smartphone use for post-primary students, but issued a new directive for primary schools to bring in new policies that ban the use of smartphones during the school day.
Rachel Harper, principal at St Patrick's National School in Greystones, is the founder of It Takes A Village, which signed up eight primary schools in the catchment area in 2023 to a no smartphone voluntary code until the children reached secondary school.
'Going back two years ago, nobody was talking about this,' she says. 'Parents were quietly worrying about it, but were afraid to speak too much because they didn't want to come across as judgmental to other parents.'
Rachel Harper, principal of St Patrick's National School in Greystones, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Alan Betson
For Harper, who is on the HSE Therapeutic Wellbeing Pilot project steering group, it's vital to normalise such conversations. 'All of us working together, that's how we're going to get change. There have to be a lot more restrictions with the tech companies themselves.'
For now, the change has to come from within. Eighteen-year-old Nugent has a variety of tools to ensure he doesn't idle away his days on social media. 'I had Minimalist Phone from the start of third year,' he says. 'I deleted it and re-downloaded it. I've had it now without deleting it for maybe a year and a half.'
Minimalist Phone is an app that helps users to navigate social media in a mindful way. 'It changes your phone screen so you have to search for apps if you want to go into them,' he says. 'Before opening certain apps, you can get a timer and you have to wait for a bit before opening the app. I also got an app called NoScroll – you can block certain websites. You can block YouTube shorts in YouTube – that solved that issue for me: a lot of the things posted there are just TikToks, posted in YouTube.'
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Excessive use of social media creating generation of 'broken people', psychiatrist says
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McLoughlin has a Gameboy for his long bus journeys to college. 'If I want to entertain myself, I have a specific game, a piece of media, that I'm going to engage in, and I'm controlling the environment,' he says. And he has a notepad, not a Notes app. 'I'll write things down physically on paper. I'll keep my notepad with me all the time.'
Brocklebank has spent a lot of time reflecting on the hold his phone once had on him, and what it means to him to have freedom from it. Letting his phone run out of battery helps him appreciate the magnitude of the spell that was once cast on him. 'One day I was standing in the rain and my phone died and I was like, 'Oh, I'm holding a brick now,'' he relates. 'It took away a lot of the phone's power.'
As for Nuala Whittle in Berlin? She has a sharper, more brutal tactic to reduce her smartphone use. 'Throw it,' she says, with a laugh. 'When you want to stop using your phone, launch it as far away from you as you can towards a surface that won't break it. If you're on the bed, throw it on to the couch. If you're on the couch, throw it on to the carpet. And then, if you're really comfortable in the chair, just rely on the fact that you're so comfortable that you don't want to get up.'
'Sometimes you have to do silly things,' Whittle concludes. 'Literally: just throw it away.'
*Mary's name has been changed.