Early in October 2025, Fred Ramsdell was hiking in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains with his wife, Laura O’Neill. His phone was disconnected, and he was on a digital detox. But his Monday was interrupted by his wife’s screams. Ramsdell’s first concern was that she’d spotted some grizzly bears.
The truth, however, was far more interesting.
When O’Neill finally regained cellular service, her phone was flooded with hundreds of text messages. All of them said the same thing — that Ramsdell had just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
And the Nobel Committee was unable to reach him because he was off the grid.
Ramsdell, 64, comes from a generation for whom disconnecting from the digital world is normal. Yet, this has made headlines because being offline is such a rare glitch in the matrix these days. We live in a time where if we do not live digitally, we barely live at all.
The trajectory that brought us here is unmistakable if you follow the breadcrumbs of our digital immersion:
- 2023: Americans average a daily phone screen time of four hours and 25 minutes (up by 30% from 2022).
- 2024: 42% of older people, 56% of millennials, and 59% of Gen Z say they spend more time interacting virtually than in person.
- 2025: Across 24 countries, a median of 28% of adults are almost always online.
This timeline could be traced much further back, but you get the idea. Digital stimulation is at an all-time high. We text each other even when we’re in the same room. The proof of meeting our friends lies more in the photos in our phone gallery than in the conversations we remember. And everything has meaning only when it’s digitally validated.
At this point, something’s gotta give.
Turns out, something is. The generations that the world accuses of being chronically online are actively disengaging from the internet and other digital channels.
The Analog Renaissance is (Finally) Here
People who grew up almost entirely online are deliberately, and often radically, reclaiming the pre-digital life. Tangible books, mechanical watches, zines, cassette tapes, and other analog elements are staging a comeback, and how!
In France, vinyl sales and revenue tripled between 2016 and 2021. America witnessed vinyl sales surpassing CD purchases in 2021 — for the first time in 30 years. In Brazil, revenue from vinyl shot up by 136% in 2023. Clearly, the vinyl revival is not a temporary blip, and it’s slowly but steadily smashing records.
But this goes far beyond music. Fountain pens are having their moment in the spotlight as sales surge. Board game cafes are cropping up in major cities across the world.
And film photography has exploded among Gen Z. Kodak, which nearly died in the digital revolution, now can’t keep up with the demand for 35mm film. (Simultaneously, Instagram influencers with millions of followers are posting grainy film photos with the hashtag ‘nofilter’ — the irony apparently lost on everyone).
It doesn’t end here. At the start of 2025, over a third of people in the UK were eager to begin the year with a digital detox. Zoom out globally, and you see that digital detox retreats are growing popular.
The term is also finding its way and cementing its place in our languages.
- In Japan, they call it dejitaru detox.
- In France, it is déconnexion.
- The Dutch have onthaasten — literally, ‘de-speed’ or slow down.
Every culture is developing its own way to talk about this movement because every culture is feeling the exhaustion.
Skeptics laugh it off as a Luddite movement that denounces technology. But if you take a genuinely curious look at it, you’ll see that, objectively, the analog renaissance is simply a way to reclaim some balance in an increasingly digital world. At its most successful, this shift helps us straddle the fast life and the slow life. It allows us to live in the present without losing ourselves to the promise of the future.
But what sparked this change? The tipping point wasn’t just one thing. Instead, it was a cascade of eye-openers.
The Catalysts of Discontent
Young people today have lived through the entire arc of digital and social media’s promises and betrayals. They have watched connection be corrupted by performance, information degraded into misinformation, and creativity mutilated into content.
- Every publicly uploaded photo is now used for AI training.
- Every thought is turned into data for targeting ads.
- Every creative work is instantly stolen by machines that will learn to imitate it and brand it as ‘intelligence.’
The internet, which began as a playground for human expression, has become a factory farm of algorithmic slop.
Consider what happened to search. What used to be an act of discovery (following links, evaluating sources, arriving at a judgement, and forming an opinion), has been replaced by AI summaries that flatten everything into the same confident voice and feed us conclusions (fact-checking be damned).
Or consider creative academic work. Students who use ChatGPT to write essays are cheating, yes. But they’re also atrophying their own capacity to think. Nicholas Carr summed it up best when he wrote:
“Armed with generative AI, a B student can produce A work while becoming a C student.”
Then, there’s the anxiety of constantly being online. Studies show that heavy social media use correlates with increased rates of depression and anxiety. Whether it was this death of mental health, the loss of critical thinking skills, or simply the end of joy on the internet, Gen Z and younger millennials seem to have had enough.
Why We Need the Analog Renaissance
Digital makes dishonesty effortlessly possible.
When a ‘writer’ uses AI to write their essay and presents it to us as their thinking, they are, to put it bluntly, lying. When an ‘artist’ generates an image artificially and calls it their art, they’re misrepresenting their capability. When someone lets algorithms curate their taste and offers it up as their own judgment, they’re being dishonest about who they are.
These slipups may seem like minor deceits, but they are betrayals of the fundamental trust that allows us to work, learn, and create together as communities. The problem escalates because when some of us start lying, everyone is forced into suspicion.
- Did this author actually write that book themselves?
- Did this designer really create this work of art?
- Is this person’s success real or algorithmically propped up?
When doubt like this creeps in, trust collapses — first between individuals and then across communities. So yes, digital makes dishonesty effortless.
That’s why analog is the ideal counterpoint. It makes dishonesty harder and forces us to be honest. When we write by hand, those are our words. When we shoot on film, those 36 frames represent our choices about what mattered enough to capture. When we sketch a design on paper, the process is evident.
Analog work carries proof of itself.
It allows us to trust one another without having to investigate whether we’re being honest. This matters because we don’t get to opt out of the community. We depend on being able to trust that people are who they claim to be, that their work represents their actual ability, and that their ideas are genuinely theirs.
When that trust disappears, everything that requires cooperation — education, creative work, or professional projects — becomes impossible or deeply degraded.
The Best of Both Worlds?
There was a time when digital meant being excited about emails from friends, not frustrated about endless spam emails we didn’t sign up for.
It meant late-night movie marathons with the whole family, not siloed entertainment with separate Netflix accounts. It meant burning CDs to make mixtapes for someone you cared about, not algorithmically generated playlists that guess what you want to hear.
Then, in the blink of an eye, passivity was marketed as progress, and things quickly went downhill.
But if we go a little bit back to the future, there is a middle ground where the two worlds can co-exist. The internet does not have to be this bad. Digital life does not have to be the antithesis of real life. It can be an ally.
However, until the tech bros dial down their avarice and learn to make better decisions (better for everyone, not just for a select few), the analog renaissance will be here to save the day.