They Want the Internet to Stop—But Not Yet
Monday, May 26.2025.
Imagine being born into a world where the sun always shines, but you’ve never felt warm.
That’s what it’s like to be Gen Z in 2025: surrounded by connection, yet starving for intimacy.
They are the most connected generation in history—and also the loneliest. The most therapized—and still unbearably raw.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that nearly half of them say they wish they’d grown up without the internet.
It sounds like rebellion. It’s actually grief.
Deep, quiet grief for what was never offered: stillness, presence, coherence, containment.
But even as they fantasize about a world without apps, they turn to those same apps to say so. They swipe through therapist memes, confess their trauma to AI bots, and learn to self-diagnose from short-form videos.
They are in pain, and they are astonishingly resourceful about it. But let’s not mistake resourcefulness for well-being. Or resignation for resilience.
This is a generation trying to make soup from bone shards.
Grief as Intelligence: Why Gen Z’s Ambivalence Is Not a Contradiction
The digital curfew trend—half of Gen Z wants one—is not about technophobia. It’s a sophisticated, unconscious recognition of what unregulated exposure to infinite stimulation does to a developing nervous system. These aren’t contradictions; they’re internal uprisings.
“I want someone to take it away,” they whisper.
“But I’m the one who has to use it to survive.”
They know the scroll numbs them—and also sustains them. They are asking for the very thing they have never been given: boundaries that don’t come with shame. Limits that feel like care, not control. Containment without coercion.
This is not hypocrisy. It’s moral clarity with no scaffolding.
Why They Turn to the Algorithm for Therapy
We say Gen Z avoids therapy because of stigma or cost.
But many of them aren’t avoiding therapy—they’re trying to build it with spare parts.
They talk to Replika bots at 2 a.m. not because they think it’s better than a therapist, but because it’s available. It doesn’t judge.
It doesn’t say, “We have a waitlist until November.” It doesn’t file an insurance claim that might out them to their parents.
Yes, they know it’s not the same. But they live in a world where:
Their schools outsource emotional labor to wellness apps.
Their parents are drowning in unprocessed trauma.
Their friendships are mediated by streaks, likes, and the threat of ghosting.
In this world, you take what you can get. You make meaning from memes. You find compassion in code.
The Cultural Withdrawal That No One Wants to Name
What if Gen Z’s pain isn’t caused by the internet—but by the fact that the internet had to become their only refuge?
We like to pathologize the youth for their screen use. But where else do they go when:
Community centers have shuttered.
Youth pastors have been discredited.
Therapists are booked out for six months.
And parents, if present, are often as dysregulated as the kids?
We used to pass down lullabies, initiation rituals, elder wisdom. Now we pass down content warnings and mindfulness apps. Gen Z isn’t “addicted to tech.”
They’re more likely carrying the burden of cultural collapse with a set of tools designed for entertainment, not healing.
AI Companions as a Mirror to Our Collective Absence
Let’s be clear: AI therapists are not the problem. They’re the mirror.
They reflect the quiet evacuation of adults from the emotional lives of youth. They highlight the failure of institutions to evolve. They are the synthetic answer to a spiritual famine.
What Gen Z is really asking is:
Will someone witness me without monetizing it?
Will someone hold space without sending me a link?
Will someone stay, even if I’m not “growth-oriented” today?
If we don’t answer, the bots will. Not because they’re better, but because they’re there.
The Poignancy of the Curfew Request
There is something unbearably tender about a generation asking to be protected from themselves. It is a reminder that discipline, when offered in love, is a form of devotion.
Their curfew requests are not about censorship. They’re prayers for sacred time.
Time to sleep.
Time to cry.
Time to feel the beat of their own hearts without background noise.
They are not rejecting the internet. They are mourning the parts of themselves they had to upload in order to be understood.
If You’re Listening…
If you are a parent, teacher, clinician, pastor, elder, or just an adult with five minutes of regulated attention to give—here’s your call.
Show up. Without fixing. Without optimizing. Without asking them to download yet another app.
Let them grieve the world they were promised and never received.
Let them rage about the noise and the silence.
Let them whisper, “Can we turn it off now?”
And then say yes.
Not because they should live without the internet,
But because they should never have had to live without us.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
British Standards Institution. (2025). Almost half of young people would prefer a world without internet, UK study finds. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/20/almost-half-of-young-people-would-prefer-a-world-without-internet-uk-study-finds
Medibank & The Growth Distillery. (2025). State of mind: Australia’s mental health conversation. The Daily Telegraph. https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/lifestyle/gen-z-are-more-stressed-but-less-likely-to-access-help-according-to-report/news-story/3ec7434770537d7b8926eae5a57db769
Zhou, S., Li, A., O’Dea, B., & Christensen, H. (2024). Exploring users’ experiences with generative AI chatbots for mental health support: A qualitative study. npj Mental Health Research, 3(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44184-024-00097-4