It’s the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human | Gaby Hinsliff

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It’s the love-hate relationship that defined a generation. We think we know all about teenagers and the phones to which they’re so umbilically tied: sleeping with them under the pillow, panicking at the prospect of ever being denied wifi, so glued to the screen that they’re oblivious to the world unfolding around them. Yet the first generation to have never really known a life without social media – the drug that primarily keeps them coming back to their phones for more – is now grown up enough to reflect on what it may have done to them, and the answers are almost enough to break your heart.

Two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-olds think social media does more harm than good and three-quarters want tougher regulation to protect younger people from it, according to polling for the New Britain Project, a thinktank founded by a former teacher, Anna McShane. Half think they spent too much time on it when they were younger, with regret highest among those who started using social media youngest. And most tellingly of all, four in five say they’d keep their own children away from it for as long as they could if they became parents. This isn’t how anyone talks about something they love, but how you look back on a relationship that was in retrospect making you miserable.

Though the focus groups she conducted confirmed that parents were desperate for help weaning children off screens, what’s refreshing about McShane’s research is that it suggests the generations aren’t as locked in combat as they sometimes feel; that increasingly, we’re all on the same side. Gen Z, it turns out, don’t need more lectures from their (often equally addicted) elders about getting off that bloody phone. If anything, they may have something to teach us.

This Friday, parliament will vote on the Labour MP (and former teacher) Josh MacAlister’s private member’s bill on safer phone use, expected to be backed by the government but only after being notably watered down. Though MacAlister originally favoured raising the legal limit for accessing social media from 13 to 16, the bill now only commits ministers to reporting back in a year’s time on the case for doing so, plus conducting further research and publishing fresh guidance on children’s screen time. With X’s CEO, Elon Musk, virtually embedded in the White House, some will suspect ministers of ducking a confrontation with American tech giants. But there are other reasons not to rush in, at least until the complex new Online Safety Act due to come into force this spring has settled down, and ministers have had a chance to learn from similar bans being introduced in Australia and Norway.

Rather cheeringly, however, it seems in the meantime gen Z are taking things into their own hands. A generation of kids who grew up online, spent lockdown in their bedrooms, and all too often started their first jobs dialling remotely into Zoom meetings, now seems to be actively trying to teach itself to socialise the analogue way.

Nightclubs and gig venues from Manchester to Ibiza to Berlin have started asking punters to put stickers over their phone cameras, encouraging them not to film on the dancefloor but just to lose themselves in the moment like their parents got to do. Meanwhile an explosion of gen Z running clubs, reading groups, in-person singles parties for people exhausted by dating apps, and “digital detox” events where phones are left outside the door, reflect a palpable and touching new hunger for old-fashioned face-to-face connection.

The 25-year-old writer Adele Zeynep Walton founded Logging Off Club, which organises real life social meet-ups for people trying to wean themselves off their phones, after a chance conversation during a 25th birthday weekend away with friends. All of them, it turned out, were worried about their screen time and were secretly trying to cut it down, but felt self-conscious talking about it. At Logging Off Club events, she says cheerfully, “we take people’s phones off them at the door and put them in a bucket”. It’s like ripping away a comfort blanket at first, but it makes people talk to each other rather than hiding behind a screen. At one event she organised jointly with City Daze, another social club that organises phone-free walks round London, attendees were even given cue cards to help them start conversations.

What seems to be building up among younger women in particular isn’t just a backlash against the kind of toxic content, bullying or political disinformation rampant in their online lives, but a feeling that spending so much time on their phones has deprived them of something human and important. Walton is starting to think about where she might want to settle down in the next few years, only to realise that she feels curiously unrooted from any real-life community: though she’s been talking for years online to people she has never met, she doesn’t even know her physical neighbours’ names. Her generation has, she says, “been sold that lie of connection” by the big platforms but are finding the pseudo-communities offered there ultimately unsatisfying, leaving them wanting more. Her book about all of this, Logging Off, is published in June and though it’s hard to read as a parent without thinking guiltily that society has been asleep at the wheel here, there’s something oddly uplifting about watching gen Z start to try to rebuild the lives they clearly feel they’ve been missing.

The US sociologist Robert D Putnam is best known for describing the downs in his classic Bowling Alone, which argued that society became more fragmented, polarised and distrusting over the second half of the 20th century as Americans retreated from collective activities – from team sports to churchgoing – that once knitted them together. But in his more recent book, The Upswing, written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, Putnam goes back another half a century to explore how that sociable state of bowling together originally came about. It was, he argues, also in part a reaction to a period of loneliness and isolation, but this time caused by people moving from close-knit rural and small town America to bigger towns and cities where there were jobs and opportunities, but where they had few ties. What followed was a mushrooming of social clubs, from rotary clubs and scout groups to unions, that brought them together; though they didn’t know it, in retrospect their members were building the beginning of an upswing. The moral of the story, for those daring to be hopeful? That once societies get far enough down the path of isolation, sometimes the only way left is up.