Ottawa's young people are part of a growing national movement — and it's not the one you'd expect from a generation that grew up swiping before they could read.
Across Canada, Gen Z students are voluntarily pulling back from their smartphones and social media, embracing what's being called digital minimalism: a deliberate, thoughtful reduction in how much time and mental energy they hand over to their devices.
What Is Digital Minimalism?
Digital minimalism isn't about throwing your phone into the Rideau Canal. It's about getting intentional — questioning which apps actually add value to your life and which ones are just quietly draining it.
For many young Canadians, the realization hits during a particularly bad scroll session: an hour gone, nothing gained, and a vague sense of anxiety that wasn't there before. So instead of waiting for a screen time warning to guilt them, they're making the choice themselves.
This might mean deleting Instagram from their phone entirely but keeping it on a desktop browser. It might mean a "dumb phone" swap — trading a smartphone for a basic device that can only call and text. Or it might be as simple as leaving the phone in another room while studying or eating.
Why Now?
Researchers and educators point to a few converging factors. There's growing awareness of how social media platforms are engineered to be addictive — the endless scroll, the notification ping, the dopamine hit of a like. That awareness, once mostly the domain of tech critics and parents, has filtered down to the users themselves.
There's also the mental health conversation. Gen Z has grown up watching the discourse around anxiety, depression, and social comparison play out in real time — and many are connecting the dots between heavy phone use and how they feel on a given day.
And unlike older generations who adopted smartphones as adults, Gen Z is the first cohort to have grown up entirely inside the algorithm. Some of them are simply... tired.
Ottawa Students Are Noticing the Difference
Locally, teachers and university counsellors in Ottawa have noted students arriving to class more present, more willing to sit with boredom, and less reflexively reaching for their pockets when a conversation lulls.
For some students, it started as a challenge — a week without TikTok, a month off Instagram — and turned into something more permanent. The payoff they describe isn't productivity, exactly. It's more like clarity. Less noise.
The Irony Isn't Lost on Anyone
There's something a little funny about a generation that communicates almost entirely through memes and voice notes now leading the charge on unplugging. But that's kind of the point: these aren't digital refuseniks or technophobes. They're people who grew up fluent in the language of social media and are now choosing, consciously, to speak it a little less.
Whether the trend has staying power — or whether the next big app will pull everyone back in — remains to be seen. But for now, some of Ottawa's young people are finding out what it feels like to look up.
Source: CBC News
