Why Gen Z is Romanticising Disappearing from their Digital Presence

We’ve all experienced this feeling before, at least once in our lives. Your phone is constantly ringing, endless group chat texts, emails piling up, Instagram stories need watching. And somewhere in between that fifth notification and your morning coffee, you suddenly fantasise about throwing your phone out of the window and simply vanishing.

For young activists and politically engaged people, these feelings are taken to an even higher level. Meet Lexi, a 24-year-old from Portugal who is a European Citizens’ Initiatives Ambassador for the European Commission, previously ran for mayor of Porto last October, and works as a Global Shaper.

I sometimes wonder if I should take a week or a month off from social media, but I rarely actually do, as I feel I have commitments to fulfil,” he tells me.

Between managing a personal account, a poetry book page, and the Feminist Men in Portugal page, cooperating with EU initiatives like the European Citizens’ Panels, and his political activism with Volt Portugal, there’s always something needing his attention.And even without any formal commitments, there’s still that internal pressure.

“If I’m being honest, even if there were no commitments as the abovementioned, I’d probably still feel the need to voice my opinions or share others; about what is going on in Portugal, Europe and the world”.

But here’s where it gets complicated:

“Maybe all that would be acceptable, by my own criteria, if I also didn’t get stuck watching reels for hours every day”.

Do you find yourself opening Facebook or Instagram just to check that one message, but then you end up doomscrolling for hours?

“The easy dopamine is often too strong,” Lexi explains.

“And I sometimes gaslight myself that because the content I curated my feed to have is educational, political, usually nuanced, then it’s okay to be consuming it. But no, not when I should be doing something.”

This leads to procrastination, unmet deadlines and working under constant pressure.

“I reflect on how much I could achieve for myself and the causes I believe in if I didn’t get stuck in these loops, and it’s indeed a lot of wasted potential.”

It’s worth noting these loops, the infinite scrolling, algorithmic feeds are all there designed to keep us glued to our phones.

The content itself makes it worse. Staying updated with geopolitics, wars, genocides, and systemic oppression creates a strange dissonance:

“It’s quite dissonant to be a happy person whilst I see the world burning on my phone, whilst I try to do my part but also not be consumed by it. No one teaches us how to deal with this.”

Social media has created this weird paradox. Young people are now announcing their departure on the very platforms they are leaving. Posts like “Taking a break from social media. Message me if you need me” have become a whole thing. Digital detox retreats advertise phone-free weekends in nature, and the infamous algorithm shows you “cottagecore” fantasies of offline living.

There’s a risk of turning withdrawal into simply another aesthetic rather than addressing the root cause. When stepping away becomes a trend, the trend can distract us from the reasons people needed the break in the first place. Romanticising it makes it seem glamorous without understanding why young people feel the need to escape.

So, here’s the million-euro question: why do we engage online so much instead of offline?

“Participating in Erasmus+ projects and attending events hosted by the Commission is great for developing multicultural skills, empathy, tolerance and appreciation towards diversity,” Lexi reflects.

“But these always leave me curious about the people who lived in my street and my town too. If I met one of them in Erasmus+, we’d have the time of our lives. But as neighbours we just say hello and nod when passing on the street.”

We visit friends thousands of kilometres away but feel awkward making local friends outside social settings like in cafés or universities. So why don’t we?

“I know, by experience, that as soon as I’m back home my daily usage of social media will go back to the same it was, regardless of the alarms and limits I try to set for myself.”

The romanticisation is not necessarily the problem. The problem is that we are treating the symptom, the desire to escape, as the story, when we should be interrogating the system that has us wanting the urge to escape feel necessary in the first place.

Perhaps going offline not need to be romanticised or pathologised. Perhaps it just needs to be possible, without guilt and without turning it into content.