When Gabriela Nguyen decided to do some spring cleaning as a teenager, she was organizing the apps on her phone.
“It was cleaning. It’s supposed to make you feel better,” the 24-year-old told CNBC Make It. “My actual room was a complete mess, but my life was on my phone, so I’ll feel better.”
Mixing up real life with online life was one of the “series of cracks” that showed technology use was getting out of hand, she said. “The app became the center of gravity in my life, and everything else revolved around it.”
Currently, Nguyen does not have any personal social media. She and other Gen Z members are helping their peers make the leap, practicing what she calls “apristineness,” a play on the words “app” and “abstinence,” which refers to “resolutely encouraging young people to remove social media from their personal lives,” according to the advocacy group’s website of the same name. Founded in 2024 as a student organization at Harvard University, the group promotes what it calls the 5D method: reduce, deactivate, delete, downgrade, and ultimately stay away from social media.
But Applicity is not a “hard and fast policy,” Nguyen said. “It means we are moving in that direction.”
Ditch the social media “trinity”
Nguyen’s own path to training was winding. She grew up in San Jose, where she says she was immersed in “Silicon Valley techno-optimism.” “It’s the local culture.”
She got an iPod Touch at age 9 and her first social media account at age 10. Her “trinity” was Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Instagram was your “public portfolio,” she says. Snapchat was “a place where business was really down on a daily basis.” And TikTok was “maximum brain rot.”
Nguyen said she felt they decreased her alertness, sleep, energy, self-esteem and confidence.
Social media companies have long fought back against accusations that their platforms are harmful to young people’s mental health.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri testified in February as part of a landmark social media trial currently underway that he doesn’t believe people can become clinically addicted to social media. However, he said some people may experience “problematic uses” of Instagram, including “spending more time on Instagram than they are comfortable with.”
In response to a 2024 lawsuit alleging that TikTok has “addictive features” and is “harming young people’s mental health,” TikTok cited “safety features such as default screen time limits, family pairing, and default privacy for minors under 16,” and said it was “proud of the work we have done to protect teens and remain deeply committed.”
“We want Snapchat to be safe for everyone, and we provide special protections for minors to prevent unwanted contact and provide an age-appropriate experience,” Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said in prepared remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2024.
But Nguyen says her experience with the three apps had a detrimental domino effect on her life. “It’s not just the scrolling that gets worse; the more you doomscroll, the worse your view of the world gets,” Nguyen says. Still, she felt she “couldn’t lose the only way I knew what was going on and how to find out what I liked and how to stay in touch with people.”
Nguyen was an honor student in high school, but her final challenge came when she “couldn’t concentrate.” She recalls doing an assignment when she was 14 years old, which took much longer than expected because of “technology distractions.”
“The app became the center of gravity in my life, and everything else revolved around it.”
Gabriella Nguyen
Founder of Appstinence
For years, Nguyen tried temporary digital detoxes and limited screen time. None worked. There she lost even more weight. At the beginning of college, she thought, “This is kind of cool,” and deleted her Instagram. But then she started spending a lot of time on Snapchat. For a while, she said she had a “toxic relationship” with Snapchat and TikTok, deleting and redownloading them repeatedly.
Nguyen added that she recognized that “my real life was more important” than the appeal of these apps. She got involved in even more clubs and student communities during her senior year because it meant “pursuing what I felt they gave me in the real world.”
Over time, she says she stepped away from social media completely.
One of the first challenges, Nguyen says, was convincing her friends that she wanted to devote more time and attention to her real-life relationships instead of going offline and breaking them off.
“Just because I don’t want to take pictures with you anymore doesn’t mean we’re adrift or that you’re bad friends or anything like that,” she explains. “Actually, quite the opposite.”
“No ads, no algorithms, no AI slop.”
After quitting social media and becoming better at it, Nguyen says she wanted to help others do the same. She and her talented colleagues offer what they call “digital lifestyle planning,” or peer-to-peer coaching, to help people “redesign their relationship with technology,” the website says.
Nguyen said there has been “overwhelming” demand for the service, with “hundreds” of people expressing interest in Applicity and about 2,000 people attending the organization’s in-person events around the world.
One of the key factors is that our coaches are digitally native Gen Zers. “It’s not like, ‘Okay, we’re here on the top of a hill preaching to you,'” she says. “I know what it’s like. I’ve literally been there.”
And Nguyen still struggles with that sometimes. Her own “breaking away from stereotypes” will likely last a lifetime, she says.
She now uses a “defective” phone that allows her to call and email but doesn’t connect to the internet, and she has stopped streaming services. (She says it’s okay if a friend plays a Spotify playlist when we’re together; if not, she has a car radio to listen to.) She uses an ad-free browser, no screens in her bedroom, and only checks email on her computer.
She calls or texts to talk to friends and family. That way, “no ads, no algorithms, no AI slop,” she says. Nguyen said she now has “deeper relationships with far fewer people” than before.
Currently, many of her friends have also left social media. “If we all suddenly made Instagram, it would just be redundant because I’ve already met them or talked to them on the phone,” she says. “What else can I do with Instagram?”
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