When Gabriela Nguyen wanted to do some spring cleaning as a teenager, she’d organize the apps on her phone.
“That was cleaning; it would make me feel better,” the 24-year-old tells CNBC Make It. “My actual room was in complete disarray, but it would feel better because my life was on my phone.”
Conflating her real and online lives was one of “a series of cracks” signaling her technology use had gotten out of hand, she says. “The apps became the center of gravity of my life in which the other things would orbit.”
Today, Nguyen has no personal social media. She practices what she calls appstinence, a play on “app” and “abstinence” that refers to “a firm push for young people to remove social media from their personal lives,” according to the website for her advocacy group of the same name, where she and other members of Gen Z help their peers take the leap. Founded in 2024 as a student organization at Harvard, the group encourages what it calls the 5D method: decrease, deactivate, delete, downgrade and finally depart social media.
But appstinence is not “a hard and fast line,” Nguyen says. “The idea is that you’re moving in that direction.”
