The Year of Analog takes shape

Social media usage is declining for the first time in over a decade. Gen Z is driving a "social exit"—scrapbooking, film cameras, CD players, paper journals, board games, cinema over streaming. Ofcom reports 48% of young adults say they spend too much time on social media; 68% have actively adopted strategies to manage it.

TikTok processes this as an aesthetic trend (#analog2026). Wellness discourse processes it as self-care. Marketing processes it as opportunity. The gap: the collective has framed this as individual lifestyle choice when it may be an immune response—the first mass intuition that the attention economy has been extractive, and that extraction has costs no algorithm will show you.