In the late 19th century, before the invention of cinema and radio, every piece of music, performance, speech—even a sight as natural as a rainbow—was a unique experience. It doesn’t repeat. Cinema and radio changed that, forcing a major shift in the way we consume popular culture. Many of the world’s leading media companies were founded at that time by men with an insatiable fear of new media. It resulted in an incredible lack of self-control—they didn’t think they needed it. This was the future, and it was making them rich. More was clearly better.
Film and radio will eventually merge into television—creating an even greater disconnect from working at your core while removing human connection and strategic dopamine sparks. Of course people get addicted: More happiness and no effort equals a better future. When streaming into the personal became ubiquitous, that future combined even greater profits with the law of diminishing returns—crushed empathy, heightened anxiety, and a lack of community all became fundamental to the human experience.
This has ultimately led to general social unrest, and I think 2025 will be the time when some segments of society will begin to withdraw from their screen-based addictions. I predict that the leaders of this change will be the digital natives of Gen Z which will facilitate the techless exchange into a new phenomenon similar to its original technological development.
Gen Z—currently between the ages of 13 and 27—is the most susceptible to digital addiction. After all, they were born after the internet was invented. Their primary means of understanding the world has been digital from the beginning. Real agency—connecting with other people—is still largely absent from schoolwork, coaching, and mentoring. Even the common knowledge of navigating ordinary life has been reduced to apps: the dominance of the screen is institutionalized with all restrictions and none of the learned experiences of surviving it.
Without their emotions. The mindset of Gen Z is emerging as a dominant force for change in today’s society. What’s expensive—everyone’s biggest problem—is driving Gen Z’s priorities. They prefer user-generated content over expensive new media. They seek long-term meaning in experience beyond the temporary gratification of materialism. In a recent US Gallup poll, more than 50 percent of respondents indicated that they did not trust technology companies, the government, or the justice system.
Gen Z is also embracing lean and low-impact habits, questioning the values brought about by respectable media, and growing demands for a work-life balance that would have scared generations before them. All of this is good for important social developments.
So, in 2025, I believe the next step will be for Gen Z to embrace the simplicity of technology-free human-events without the mediation of an ever-disruptive screen. The shock of youth, a new phenomenon as a film is still in its infancy. It’s scary, sure—impossible—to make a real change in the digital life we’re so much dominated by. But it’s human and it has dimensions and it’s full of things that we can’t find online. That’s who we humans are at our dirty core, and for all those reasons I believe we’ll see the beauty of screen withdrawal begin to be celebrated, with Gen Z leading the way.
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