Would You Go Back to a Time Before Smartphones If You Could?

Turns out, looking back is also about looking forward.

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Back in the ’90s, before everyone had smartphones, were things just … better? Tech-focused nostalgia has become a potent cultural force in recent years, driving sales of “dumbphones,” iPods, CDs, and other retro technology. According to a 2023 survey, 67 percent of Americans wish they could go back to a time “before everyone was ‘plugged in.’” The psychologist behind that survey, Clay Routledge, has found that this sort of nostalgia is more than just a yearning to go backwards. “We can often feel overwhelmed in the moment and in the challenges we face today. It's hard to see past them. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment,” Routledge explains. Nostalgia can actually teach us how we want to live now, and in the future.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

 Julie Beck: If you had one word—it can be a noun, it can be an adjective, it can be any part of speech that you want—to describe your overall relationship to technology at this moment in time.

Voice memo: Antagonistic?

Voice memo: Complicated.

Voice memo: Fraught.

Voice memo: Connection.

Voice memo: I think of it as an addiction. Similar to how I relate to, like, sugar or anything else that I sort of compulsively overindulge in.

Beck: What’s your word?

Voice memo: Indentured.

Voice memo: I was gonna say reluctant, but maybe that’s not right.

Voice memo: Very frequent user.

Beck: Okay, that’s a lot of words, but we’ll take it.

Beck: I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Natalie Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.

Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.

Amy Poehler: Have you heard the young people say “touch grass”?

Tiktok user: I switched to a dumb phone. This is the Nokia 2780.

Amy Poehler: It’s like a term, basically, which is like, Get off your phones.

Subway Takes: Smartphones are evil, they’re ruining society, and we need to just stop. 100% disagree.

Amy Poehler: Get off the internet, and go outside and touch grass.

Tiktok user 2: I nominate everyone for the Touch Grass Challenge. Go outside and touch some grass like I’m doing right now. Go, go, go!

[Birds chirping]

Beck: In this season, we’ll be exploring the often-fraught, always-changing relationship people have with technology. And the ways that, in this moment, the terms of the relationship are being renegotiated.

Brennan: Julie, the way that I would like to renegotiate my relationship to technology is that I would like to throw my phone in the East River. Beck: Natalie, you could throw your phone in the East River. Why don’t you?

Brennan: It’s not really just about my phone. I wanna throw your phone in there too, Julie. But I can’t take everyone’s phone.

Beck: Mmm.

Brennan: So I think what I mean to say is that I yearn for a pre-phone era.

Beck: I think we’re not the only ones who have this fantasy. It’s all over TikTok.

TikTok user: What’s the biggest trend of 2026 gonna be? Analog. This past year, we’ve seen the rise of nostalgia; the switch from iPhone cameras to digital cameras…

TikTok user 2: Here’s how to actually be more analog in 2026. First, I wanna…

TikTok user 3: The analog era is here. And while audiences say they want to go offline, with Gen Z and millennials openly expressing their desires to break from an online world and find deeper…

TikTok user 4: I stopped using an iPhone three weeks ago and the effects have genuinely been profound.

Beck: In the past few years, there’s been no shortage of people advocating for reducing screen time. But another force that has been inspiring people to rethink how they use their devices lately is: nostalgia.

[Music]

Clay Routledge:  We can often feel overwhelmed in the moment and in the challenges we face today. It’s hard to see past them. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment.

Beck: Clay Routledge and his colleagues have been studying what’s behind this widespread yearning for a time before smartphones and before social media. Clay is a psychologist who specializes in nostalgia, and he’s also the author of Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life.

Beck: Clay, hello, welcome!

Routledge: Hi, Julie.

Beck: I see you’ve got an Atari poster behind you. There’s some kind of video game that is too small for me to see what it is. What is it?

Routledge: On the shelf, I’ve got an old Nintendo, the original NES. Then I’ve got the Robotron arcade game, which is an arcade from the ’80s, and the Atari poster. So yeah, lots of video-game nostalgia from different brands and decades.

Beck: Oh, man. Perfect. Okay. It’s a nostalgia museum at your house.

Routledge: It is indeed.

Beck: Clay, just to get started, what is the point of being nostalgic about anything?

Routledge: So nostalgia is, in psychological terms, what we call a self-regulatory resource. It helps us navigate life in important ways. We don’t know the future; it’s uncertain. And so it can also be a great source of anxiety. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment and say, You know, there’s a bigger picture. Right now, maybe I’m experiencing stress or loneliness, or I just went through some difficult challenge, but my life is full of other types of experiences, and if I had these more fulfilling experiences in the past, then I should be able to have them in the future.

Beck: Yeah, I asked you about the past, and you immediately started talking about the future. Do people tend to misunderstand nostalgia by assuming, as I did, that it’s about the past?

Routledge: So nostalgia, the dictionary definition is something like: a sentimental longing for the past. When you present it like that, then it makes sense that people would assume, well, nostalgia might even be people getting stuck in the past.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: Or looking to the past too warmly and not, you know, dealing with their present realities head-on. Turns out that when people engage in this kind of nostalgic reflection, in a lot of ways they’re talking about their issues today, and they’re thinking about tomorrow.

So nostalgia actually has this very forward-looking, unexpected, hopeful quality. We often are looking for specific things that can help us with particular challenges and anxieties we’re facing, so—

Beck: Mmm.

Routledge: —and I’m articulating this as if this is happening at some deliberate or conscious level, ’cause I’m talking about more of the scientific study of nostalgia and what we’ve learned from that kind of empirical work. But in reality, of course, this is just happening almost unconsciously. People are often using nostalgia without even realizing it.

Beck: That makes sense to me when it comes to, you know, my own life and my own past experiences, right? But Clay, what about nostalgia for a time from before you were even alive? There was a stat from a survey you worked on that really struck me, which was you found that 60 percent of Gen Z wished that they could return to a time before everyone was, quote, “plugged in.” And the other generations said that too, but they actually lived through that time, whereas Gen Z has no actual memories of a time before the internet existed. So was that surprising to you?

Routledge: It was. When we first found that, I was pretty surprised because most of the work, the research on nostalgia, including the research I’ve done, is focused on autobiographical—

Beck: Mm.

Routledge: —memory, but to your point, what we started to discover with that survey is: People actually have a longing for the past that predates them. Now, of course, if you’ve studied art and culture more abstractly, we’ve long known that people have favorite eras that they’re interested in, whether it’s the architecture or the music or the fashion. So we’ve known there’s this aesthetic nostalgia that’s historical—

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: —but what we were surprised to find is that young adults have so much to look forward to in the future, and we typically think of youth as very future-oriented, but the majority of them were saying that they longed for a time really before modern technology, but really before they were alive.

And then since that survey, we’ve just done more and more surveys finding that around two-thirds of Gen Z adults say they’re nostalgic for a time before they were alive.

Beck: Right. So this seems like a little bit more than just a like, We’re bringing low-rise jeans back, right?—

Routledge: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Beck: —if they’re saying they would like to live in the past. I mean, how common is it for generations to yearn that way for a past they never actually knew, or is something about this unique?

Routledge: Yeah. There’s not a lot of research or really any research in previous generations when they were the same age as Gen Z. But we do know from our own work, in general, people tend to become nostalgic when they’re going through major life transitions or disruptions, or when the world feels particularly chaotic or uncertain.

Beck: Mmm.

Routledge: Regardless of whether you’re, you know, 20 or 60, sometimes there are sources of cultural inspiration that people wanna draw from in a more shared bank of memories that aren’t just your own, but are the memories we share as a culture. And here’s the key thing, I think, and this is the case with Gen Z too. It really isn’t the case that people want to live in the past.

Beck: Okay.

Routledge: If you start asking people Would they give up all of the modern advances? they say no. What they’re saying is they have a sentiment for some aspect of the past that they think that we’re missing today. I think there is something about Gen Z in this, you know, as digital natives who grew up in this era where this major transition from the analog world to the digital world, that seems to be sparking a particularly potent type—

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: —of historical nostalgia. And then the irony is technology really is helping facilitate this. Because how are Gen Z adults learning about retro trends? They’re on TikTok, right?

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: And so it’s funny how the technology that, on the one hand, is the source of frustration and anxiety is also the vehicle through which they’re being introduced to the analog world.

Beck: Okay, so, I was wondering because, you know, when you say you wanna return to another era, an earlier era, maybe they’re not thinking about the things they would be dissatisfied with in the earlier era, right? Like—

Routledge: Right.

Beck: —lack of social progress that we have since made. It seems like you’re saying it tends to be about something particular that they are yearning for rather than, like, a holistic desire to go back to all the things.

Routledge: Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things I think people don’t appreciate about nostalgia, ’cause it’s often portrayed as just repeating something.

Beck: Mm.

Routledge: And it really isn’t. It’s more of, like, a revising. There’s a creative process. Humans are really a progress-oriented species. We’re never content; we’re never satisfied. We’re always tinkering. We always think things can be a little bit better, and it’s frustrating, right? Because it often means we’re not ever just really happy. But that’s also the thing that drives us to positive change, and nostalgia’s very much an ingredient of that.

[Music]

Beck: So Natalie, I can remember really distinctly the last time that I was ever truly lost.

Brennan: Mm-hmm.

Beck: It was like two months before I would get my first smartphone. The year was 2013.

Brennan: So you were—how old were you then?

Beck: I was 23.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, and what I would do to get around in the days before I had Google Maps available on my phone all the time is I would look up directions on the computer before I left, and I would write them down, sometimes on my hand.

Brennan: Totally.

Beck: I had done this: I’d gotten my directions together, I had gone sightseeing, and I was heading back to my hotel. But I was so jet-lagged that I fell asleep on the bus, and when I woke up, I had no idea if I’d already missed my stop or not.

Brennan: Oh no. Do you speak Russian?

Beck: I definitely don’t. Um, but I went up to the bus driver anyways, to try to ask him if we had already passed the stop. A lot of people spoke English, you know, but he got really angry and was like, “You can’t talk to me while I’m driving.” So he wouldn’t talk to me, and I’m freaking out. And this young woman behind me, she can see how upset I am, and she speaks English. So she comes up and tells me, like, yes, we already passed the stop for my hotel. Lovely woman. She gets off the bus with me at the next stop—

Brennan: No!

Beck: —and she drew me a map on a piece of paper that she had, and she was like, “There’s this one really long road. You just have to walk on that road the whole way back.” And the hotel was on that road, so you would see it, you know, looming in the distance. And I remember she said, “It's really far. You’re gonna think that you’re never gonna get there, but I promise if you just keep walking on this one road, you will get back to the hotel.”

Brennan: Oh my God. I’d be crying. Were you crying?

Beck: Oh, for sure.

Brennan: Yeah. (Laughs.)

Beck: So anyway, I set off down the road for a really long time. It felt like miles, multiple miles.

Brennan: You’re alone.

Beck: I’m alone. I was traveling alone. When, out of nowhere, this man comes running towards me.

Brennan: Nope.

Beck: Well, it turns out he’s from a cruise ship that is docked nearby, and he is trying to find McDonald’s.

Brennan: No.

Beck: I tell him what happened. And he says, “Oh, well that’s the same direction as my cruise ship that I need to get back to. Like, I’ll just walk with you until you get back.” Eventually, my hotel appears on the horizon, finally. And there’s really no other word for it; he, like, scampers off into the night, and as he runs away, he shouts, “Goodbye, Julie. I love you.”

Brennan: No!

Beck: So anyway, I made it home safely. And that was the last time I was ever lost in my life.

Brennan: Wow. I’m feeling both jealousy and awe, in that I will—I’ve never had that experience. I mean, I’ve been on public transportation, of course, while my phone has died.

Beck: Yeah.

Brennan: But I have never been an adult without a smartphone.

Beck: I am kind of nostalgic for that memory, because it was one of those moments that really restores your faith in humanity. You know?

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: Like, I was screwed, and people appeared, and they helped me when I really needed it. And that made me feel, like, swaddled tightly in the fabric of human community. And none of that would’ve happened if I had a smartphone, if I had Google Maps.

Brennan: Yeah. I’ve only really ever had that experience manufactured for me.

Beck: Really?

Brennan: Yes. I went on this program in college. It was called the New England Literature Program.

Beck: Okay.

Brennan: And it’s basically living in cabins on a lake in New Hampshire for six weeks. And when you arrive, they take your phone for the remainder of the program. There’s no personal technology, no phones, no computers.

Beck: Hmm.

Brennan: You read Emerson, Thoreau.

Beck: Of course you do. Who else would you read?

Brennan: You visit Walden Pond. (Laughs.) And on the second day of the program is Get Lost Day.

Beck: Okay.

Brennan: In the morning, we learned how to use a compass, and then, promptly, were blindfolded, which now sounds like a cult, but it wasn’t—

Beck: (Laughs.)

Brennan: —to different locations, in groups, and then shown on a map where we were and where camp was, and told to get back by dinner.

Beck:  Wait, wait, wait. Where—like, describe to me the vibe of, like, where—

Brennan: We were dropped off? Field.

Beck: Field. End of sentence?

Brennan: Yep.

Beck: Field. Okay, okay, okay.

Brennan: In the beginning, you’re quite confident that you’re on track, and I think a few hours in, it became quite clear to us that we weren’t making it back to camp, and that we would just find a ride later in the day. We would ask somebody to take us back to camp, and just kind of spent the day enjoying and exploring.

Beck: Oh, wow. So you just pivoted. You were like, This is never happening. We’re not gonna find our way back.

Brennan: No.

Beck: Let's just be in this field.

Brennan: We’re gonna—we are going to touch grass and vibe.

Beck: Okay.

Brennan: I’m sure we were walking for hours, but I think the bigger point, instead, was to, like, get to know each other. You’re placed into vulnerability. You’re going to share this experience. But I do think extremely fondly about the program. Those whole six weeks really just sparkle with nostalgia for me, and I really struggle to differentiate between how much of that experience was the “no tech” of it all—

Beck: Hmm

Brennan: —and how much of it was just the experience at large.

[Music]

Beck: Clay, what do you think the thing is that people who are nostalgic for the ’90s or the 2000s are wanting to bring forward and revise, as you say?

Routledge: If I could sum it up using two words.

Beck: That’d be great.

Routledge: I would say control and community.

Beck: Mm.

Routledge: And the reason I’m picking those two words is because we’ve done, in addition to the surveys, we’ve done a number of qualitative projects that, you know, look at the types of nostalgic-related posts that Gen Z adults make on different social media and websites that they frequent. And what you often find is this sense that they love technology, but they wanna be in control of it, not feel controlled by it.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: So it’s that more sense of intentional use, and this is why I think you see these interesting trends like Gen Z buying old iPods and, you know, they wanna have their new iPhone. Everybody wants to have the Uber app and all the different things that make our lives a little more convenient, but sometimes there’s a sense of like, Maybe there’s a more low-tech option that allows me just to listen to music.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: And the community. I think Gen Z’s figuring out that there’s something missing in computer-mediated social relationships. And on the one hand, the social media’s really useful ’cause it helps you organize events, meet people you would’ve never met. But at the same time, they look at this time period right before smartphones really became dominant, and they said, Oh, there’s a sense of freedom. There’s a sense of organic social life, and—

Beck: You’re not looking at your phone the whole time.

Routledge: —mm hmm. And they want to build that in. A lot of times, nostalgia’s framed in a very zero-sum sort of framework, where it’s like: You’re either for the past or you’re for the future.

And I think what Gen Z’s showing us is they want both. And there’s something to say intergenerationally about this, which is maybe young people are learning about ’90s fashions on TikTok, but then what we often find is that sparks a conversation with older generations, whether it’s a parent or a coworker you know, or somebody in their run club, that they’re like, Oh, was life really like this? Did you really do this? And it creates a dialogue between generations, which I think, in this era of where everyone has their own screens and their own tailored content, is something that people feel like they’re really missing.

Beck: Yeah. I remember my dad always used to talk about that—that sort of, like, shared experience of music, ’cause you had to, like, put on a record, and so everybody’s listening to the Rolling Stones whether they like it or not. And now, obviously, we just have our sort of, like, isolated pods, and you don’t know that I’m listening to that same Taylor Swift song like 10 times in a row, and you’ll never know.

Routledge: (Laughs.) Now I know.

Beck: Okay. Yeah, I did—yeah, now everybody knows.

[Music]

Beck: We’re gonna take a quick break. When we come back: Why is this analog nostalgia bubbling up now? Do you think it has anything to do with AI coming on the scene?

[Break]

Beck: Clay, why do you think nostalgia for analog technology is so popular right now? Does the buzz about AI have anything to do with it?

Routledge: I think AI is part of it, because if machines can do all this cognitive work, and maybe even creative work, that we thought was the distinct domain of humanity, now you’re seeing more of this holistic thinking of like, what is the essence of being a person?

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: And this nostalgia, I think, is really helping people get that sense of embodiment, of like, this isn’t just cognition. There’s something about emotion, spirituality, living in the world, having these tactile sensory experiences, in-person, real contact with other real human beings.

Beck: Just with like, all the parts of life that are more than just being a brain in a jar, basically?

Routledge: Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. And if you look at a lot of the consumer nostalgic trends, many of them driven by Gen Z, they’re very much that, right?

They’re the rise of independent bookstores, the growth of music festivals, book clubs, game nights, old tech, technology that’s not online that you have to—I was talking to somebody the other day about retro video games, and they were saying, “Well, one thing that’s really cool is you have to sit next to each other to play, like two players.”

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: You’re not playing online. And so I think there’s this idea that even if it’s technology, even if it’s like video games or music, you mentioned vinyl records, which, you know, one of the big drivers of vinyl-record sales is Gen Z. They’re these low-tech, retro-tech trends that really seem to be about being out in the world, handling things, engaging with people. That’s a big driver of this.

[Music]

Beck: Natalie, let’s play a little game where I name a thing that people might be nostalgic for, and then try to psychoanalyze what it means about what they actually want from their relationship to technology.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: Okay, my first one: I see a lot of memes about people missing the days when people had computer rooms in their home. Like, picture a big wooden entertainment center with a big monitor. The shelves are all covered in CD-ROMs, and then the meme says something like, We used to respect the computer. What does this mean?

Brennan: This is really giving that control element that Clay was talking about—

Beck: Mm.

Brennan: —in that we still want to honor our computer. We love computer time, right? But I think we miss that separation in which your technology wasn’t on you at all times, right? My phone is kind of just a mini computer at this point.

Beck: Yeah.

Brennan: So I think we like having some separation of, like, now it’s time for me to go in the computer room, and when I’m done, it’s done. Does that resonate with you?

Beck: Yeah. It’s a deliberate choice to go in the computer room and sit your butt in front of it and use it and then leave.

Brennan: And then leave.

Beck: I think you’re onto something. Okay, I am personally very nostalgic for Google Reader—

Brennan: Mm.

Beck: —which, for those who may not know, it was an aggregation service for websites’ RSS feeds, which doesn't sound fun, but it was.

Brennan: (Laughs.)

Beck: Um, basically, in the late 2000s, I would use this to, like, follow all my favorite blogs and cooking websites and news sources, and it was all in one place. What do you think I’m actually longing for here?

Brennan:  Okay, well, I think for me what comes up here is feeling like the internet isn’t anymore curated towards what I wanna see. So for example, like I’ll open my Instagram app and I no longer see posts by my friends and family who I follow, but instead I see a lot of pushed posts. The algorithm just sends me what it thinks I wanna see. And so maybe you’re yearning for that time where the internet was curated to your niche hobbies and what you are actually interested in.

Beck: As opposed to just a bunch of slop.

Brennan: Okay, I wanna ask you one. I am also one of the analog Gen Zers who love to shoot film and collect old cameras. Thoughts?

Beck: Um, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I pick up my phone to take a picture of probably my cats, and before I know it, I’m, like, sucked into a million other things on my phone.

Brennan: Mm-hmm.

Beck: So I think, maybe, there’s also something about, like, when you wanna take a picture, you just wanna take a picture, and taking that function out of the everything device and letting it just be its own thing, maybe.

Brennan: It’s that.

Beck: Crushed it.

[Music]

Beck: Clay, I was fascinated to learn that back in the 17th to 19th century, nostalgia was considered a disease, and doctors tried to cure it with leeches. I read that there was this one American doctor who kind of thought the way to cure it was just bullying people, like shaming them with public ridicule. And, obviously, we no longer think nostalgia is literally a disease, but I think a thread of that negative attitude remains. I feel like I sometimes hear other people talk about nostalgia as though you’re trying to hide from reality, and maybe, you know, you should be a little embarrassed. Do you see that reaction from people when it comes to this current cultural yearning for a pre-digital era that, okay, it’s not a disease, but maybe it’s still not good for you?

Routledge: Yeah, definitely. People seem to have this view of nostalgia as anti-progress or holding people back from progress, and I spend a fair amount of time trying to disabuse them of that view and show them decades of empirical research. It really isn’t holding people back. We all have to adjust to change, and nostalgia helps people navigate that in the best way that they can. Even people who don’t think nostalgia’s a barrier to progress, oftentimes you see it characterized as a waste of time.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: Like, it’s a trivial thing, and it’s a distraction at best. Actually, nostalgia increases goal motivation. It increases a sense of meaning in life. It increases optimism. It makes people more creative. It increases empathy. Most nostalgic memories are social memories, so nostalgia actually pushes us towards each other.

Beck: When you’re saying that some people are seeing nostalgia as an impediment to progress, do you think some of that has to do with the sort of Make America Great Again brand of nostalgia where, like you’re saying, people are looking to the past to potentially bring things into the future, but sometimes what they want to bring into the future is, for instance, stricter and more stereotypical gender roles?

Routledge: So declinism is the view that things are getting worse and the past was better, whereas nostalgia really is just more of this warm feeling for the past, and I think the two are often conflated. We also find, overwhelmingly, that most of the time, nostalgia in general makes us see the humanity in other people. Or another way of saying it is: Nostalgia might be helping people wrestle with declinism—

Beck: I see.

Routledge: —and hopefully in a more productive and constructive way. A lot of Gen Z might feel like, oh, things are going in the wrong direction and their future’s gonna be worse than the future of previous generations. And there's certainly, you know, a lot of data that support that. Nostalgia’s helping them feel agentic and say, Well, you know what? We can change that. We can do something else.

Beck: It just feels surprising when you see an era that was not a great time for a lot of people recast as something to be nostalgic for.

Routledge: There are people that have nostalgia for COVID, which, again, not that long ago.

Beck: Not that fun, famously.

Routledge: Not that fun. But you know what? What’s interesting is, that wasn’t that surprising to me. When I first started doing this research, I was a professor at the University of Southampton in England. And Southampton’s a city that was heavily bombed during World War II, as a port city, and a good chunk of the city was destroyed. Not a good time. When we were doing this research, this was a little over 20 years ago, we were collecting nostalgic narratives from older British adults. Many of them were young children during that time, and they had this nostalgia.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: But what it was is they were saying, Well, this was a time that was defining, character defining. It wasn’t a pleasant time. It shaped our character, shaped our view of the world, shaped our ability to appreciate what’s important in life.

Beck: So how does this sort of personal, individual nostalgia, right, then grow and end up becoming a cultural moment or an internet trend?

Routledge: ’Cause a lot of times what people are really looking for with nostalgia is an opportunity to share memories.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: Oftentimes, nostalgia is portrayed as this very isolating, personal experience. After all, this is in your head. You’re experiencing this emotion. But people love opportunities where they can talk about nostalgic experiences, particularly ones where they might have their own idiosyncratic memory of it, but it was shared with other people.

Beck: Mmm.

Routledge: I think this is why people have a nostalgia for television where you had to wait and everyone had to watch the show at the same time, and then the next day we could all talk about it.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: You know, people are looking for ways to make contact over shared experiences where their personal nostalgia is woven into a broader cultural nostalgia that connects us.

Beck: And we’ve talked about control a good amount, and, you know, obviously we can’t actually travel back in time to an era when nobody had smartphones. Sam Altman is gonna keep making new iterations of ChatGPT, and I have no control to stop him. But do the things that we’re nostalgic for hold any lessons for how we can exert the control that we do have over the role tech plays in our lives?

Routledge: When the broader world outside of yourself, when you scale out, when it feels like you don’t have any control over that, that can be anxiety provoking; if you just focus your attention on your corner of the world, we actually do have a lot more control. Agency often happens at a local and at a personal level. You can help your neighbors. You can help your family. You can help your friends. You can be involved with those things. And even media engagement’s a way to remind ourselves of that. It’s like, Yeah, I don’t have control over the next internet iteration of a particular technology, but I can go to that retro store down the street and buy some Blu-ray discs and have a movie night at my house and have some people over.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: So I think people are really seeking that kind of experience.

Beck:  Are you seeing people actually acting on this pre-digital nostalgia?

Routledge: There is an increased sales in physical media. The live-music market is growing. Mass attendance is up, like young people going to church.

Beck: Right.

Routledge: The number of independent bookstores and the number of chain bookstores, like Barnes & Nobles, is growing. There does seem to be something changing in our culture that’s a push back to the in-person and the analog.

Beck:  Clay, I’ve noticed at many times in this conversation that you’re very optimistic about Gen Z, which is not how I often hear people talking about that generation, especially when it comes to tech. So I’m curious to hear a little bit more about how you’re thinking about it and whether Gen Z is kind of leading this trend for other generations.

Routledge: My thinking on Gen Z has really evolved, so I’m way more bullish on Gen Z—

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: —than I used to be. So I’m a psychologist, and so when all of this research was coming out about these growing mental-health problems that young people were facing and how Gen Z reported higher rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, pessimism for the future, like everyone else, I was like, This isn’t good.

Young people are supposed to be the ones that are optimistic. They’re supposed to be the ones that look to the future with possibility, and that didn’t seem to be the case. But then I started really studying this historical nostalgia and started seeing, like, yeah, Gen Z has their challenges, and maybe mental health is one of them, but they’re not just sitting there doing nothing about it.

They’re using their creativity and their problem-solving capacities that all humans have to do something about it, and I feel like this historical nostalgia that they’re engaging in is just one example of that. It’s not people my age that remember that time. It’s Gen Z that are saying, Hey, maybe we’re spending too much time online.

And so, for instance, there’s surveys showing that Gen Z are the generation most likely to report disconnecting from their digital devices.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: So now I have a different view. It’s a, you know, it’s not a certain view, of course. It’s an optimistic view, though, that Gen Z might not only be doing better than we think they are in navigating their challenges and having the agency to do so, but they actually might lead us out of this mess.

They might be the ones that remind the rest of us that there is an in-person, real-world life. So, you know, I often say that it’s common for people to feel sorry for Gen Z and worry that as digital natives, they were born too late to really appreciate the analog world.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: But in reality, it might be that they’re the generation that leads us back to it.

[Music]

Brennan: Mmmm …?

Beck: It sounds like you’re not so sure, Natalie.

Brennan: I said I wanted to throw my phone in the East River, and suddenly now I am tasked with healing everyone’s relationship to technology.

Beck: Not just you. Just you and your entire generation are responsible for the rest of us? Uh …

Brennan: I don’t know. I get so frustrated about this because I feel like I hear it all the time. It’s the same thing with climate change. Like, We’ll be the ones that need to fix all of it. I’m just like, This list is getting a little bit long. We’ve got a lot to fix now.

Beck:  Honestly, I think what talking to Clay made me realize is that so many of us are just looking for inspiration on how to move forward with technology in a way that doesn’t feel bad. Because we have to live in 2026.

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: It’s never gonna be 1996 again.

Brennan: Right. I think as a joint mission, then I can get behind that.

Beck: When, like, Gen Z doesn’t have to be the leader, nobody’s the leader, nobody’s the follower, we’re just figuring it out together.

Brennan: Yeah, or even bigger picture, when I feel like this is just on each one of us individually versus, you know, something that we’re all just, like, trying to renegotiate together. When it’s an individual mission, I think that’s maybe when I go escapist mode, when I go, like, fantasize about throwing the phone in the river, I wanna go back in time, back to those New England woods, to no phone.

Beck: Back to your fields, back to your compass.

Brennan: Yeah, back to my grass.

[Music]

Beck: That’s all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Beck: Next time on How To Touch Grass:

Ashleigh Golden: A priest, a partner, a therapist, or a friend—these people have natural limits. They get tired. They push back. But the chatbot doesn't.

Elias Aboujaoude: These programs are trained to be endlessly validating and endlessly agreeable.

Beck: Turning to AI for help with anxiety could actually end up making you more anxious. That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.