Ditch Your Screens to End the Global Friendship Recession
There’s an epidemic of loneliness, driven by all of our online-focused lives—but people are discovering that disconnecting is the key to real connection.

ILLUSTRATION: BHBH

In a cozy café in Amsterdam, with plush sofas and warm lighting, a group of people sit around talking, laughing, and playing board games. But something noticeable is missing. There is not a single phone in sight. It's one of a regular series of community events held by the burgeoning Offline Club, where members pay around $8.00 to leave their phone in a lock box at the door and spend the next few hours unplugged. Demand is growing rapidly. What started as a local initiative is quickly turning into a global movement with regular events hosted in cafés, churches, and town halls selling out fast across the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

2025 marks the turning point when people will try to spend less time on screens and to reclaim meaningful in-person connections.

Yondr, founded in the US, partners with comedy clubs, arenas, clubs, and schools to organize phone-free events. Jack White, Bob Dylan, Garth Brooks, John Mayer, Madonna, and Adele have all implemented cell phone bans at their concerts so they could stop looking out at a sea of blinking smartphones, and to help the audience to connect by disconnecting.

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Meetup, the global platform that enables over 60 million people to use the internet to get off the internet and meet up in the real world, had a 19 percent rise in registrations in 2023. The latest Meetup Measurement Report showed that the number one reason people use the platform is to find meaningful connections in person, a 50 percent rise over previous years. “Friends” is the most popular search term for events, and “Book Club” is back in the top 10.

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This story is from the WIRED World in 2025, our annual trends briefing.

We are reaching toward things that knit us back into the social fabric of local life. According to new research in the UK from the National Lottery Community Fund, half of UK adults intend to participate in local volunteering activities, both formally and informally in 2024. Over 70 percent say it's important to them to feel part of their local community.

The growing demand for real-world interactions is emerging from a confluence of societal challenges, namely the increasing awareness of the adverse effects of spending way too much time on screens, and the loneliness epidemic. Recent research by Gallup showed that 80 percent of young people under the age of 18 report feeling lonely, with 22 percent saying they have no real friends. Zero. Twelve percent of adults admitted to having no close friends in 2021, compared to just 3 percent 30 years ago. In these stats is a collective cry of loneliness. People don't just want followers anymore; they want real friendships.

But 2025 could mark the turning point of this deep friendship recession. It is the year when a rising number of people swap screen time for real-world interactions.


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Today, there is a deep sense of loss or longing, across generations, for a time before constant connectivity, apps, and algorithms. That sentiment is called anemoia, the nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.

Take the recent rise in popularity of vinyl records, Polaroid cameras, board games, and even mixtapes. According to the Recording Industry Association of American, 43.2 million EPs/LPs were sold last year, up from less than a million in 2006. From classic card games to board sets such as Monopoly and Cluedo, the compound annual growth for the board gaming market is over 9 percent. The Polaroid market is expected to double over the next seven years from $2.93 billion in 2024 to over $5.72 billion in 2031. Or the surprising resurgence of independent booksellers enjoying their sixth consecutive year of growth—a revival meeting the demand for real recommendations from real people. As of 2023, there are 2,185 independent bookstores in the United States and 1,072 in the UK.

There is a clear pining for a pre-dating-app era, with younger generations moving away from the endless swiping and “ghosting.” According to the 2023 Statista survey, millennials make up 61 percent of dating app users, whereas Gen-Z comes in at only 26 percent. Dating apps like Bumble have introduced local IRL events, including tennis tournaments, cooking or spin classes, and cocktail nights, marketed on the promise to “meet up, chat, and make moves in person.”

2025 is when people start to reclaim the communal experiences and deeper connections that have been lost in our lives. It marks a critical societal turning point where people prioritize real-world connections over the deluge we face on our digital devices. To reconnect by disconnecting.