“Touch grass,” we tell the chronically online – a phrase that applies mostly to hate-spreading X trolls or that friend who spouts Reddit conspiracies with the sincerity of a Pierian spring. But be honest. When’s the last time you did? Touch grass, that is. When’s the last time you went outside without the weight of a phone in your pocket, and just lay there for a while like you did when you were a kid? Even in Berlin, where one-third of its area is green space, we sometimes struggle to do just that.
But in a world where we don’t know what’s real or made up (or if what’s made up is made up by a real person), it’s not a bad idea to hold a blade of grass between your fingers and remind yourself that it’s green and leafy and a tangible piece of the real world. After all, the art of paying attention is not only good for us – lowers stress, decreases errors and increases positivity – but it’s scientifically proven that we’re rubbish at it.
Our average attention span has shrivelled to 40 seconds. According to National Geographic, that’s down about two minutes in two decades. But it’s not the only consequence of online living. Statistics show that 40% of users feel anxious or depressed after using social media, 59% say it affects their mental health and 89% of college students experience phantom phone vibrations: a phenomenon one Forbes writer claimed to be, “part of a broader set of technology-related anxiety issues, dubbed ‘iDisorders’”.
Included in this category is nomophobia, or no-mobile-phone-phobia, a condition that triggers a rapid heart rate, agitation and dizziness in sufferers when they are away from their phone. Sure, that’s an extreme. But we all likely suffer from the wider cultural and mental health impacts of being perpetually online: success washing, cyberbullying, scams, gambling, sleep disturbances, FOMO and constant comparison to a hyper-filtered, unattainable other, alongside plenty of physical health problems, like screen-related eye damage and headaches – to name a few.
We don’t put ourselves through all this for no reason. Our phones make us feel good. The buzz of a notification or views on our Instagram stories trigger the release of dopamine, encouraging a cycle of chemical expectation and reward. The more we check our devices, the more our brain expects the pleasure we gain by doing so, to the point of negatively impacting our everyday lives. That might sound like addiction, because it often is. The average German’s daily screen time is five and a half hours, but experts class anything over two hours as excessive. Even the language we use around stopping – ‘digital detox’ – evokes a simple fact: we have a problem.
Even the language we use around stopping – ‘digital detox’ – evokes a simple fact: we have a problem.
Offline movements are by no means revolutionary. After all, about one in three Germans don’t have social media. Six percent of Europeans didn’t even use the internet in 2025. Docudramas like The Social Dilemma and books like Digital Minimalism discussed the dangers of a life ruled by algorithms years ago. But as usual, we didn’t pay attention for long. The perfect storm of the pandemic and TikTok led to an online boom. ITU data shows that the number of global internet users surged by 782 million from 2019 to 2021, and they’ve only kept growing since. Recent Ofcom data revealed that UK adults spend over half an hour more online per day now than they did during the pandemic.
Unplugging, digital detoxing, going analogue – whatever you want to call it – reacts to this online mainstream. But more than some grassroots philosophy, it’s becoming public policy. Australia was the first country to ban social media for under-16s after a 2025 study found that 96% of children aged 10-15 used it and that seven out of 10 had been exposed to harmful content on it. This January, French lawmakers voted on a similar bill that has now been sent to the upper house of parliament for a further vote, while Germany, Spain, Denmark, Italy and the UK are considering similar avenues.
Whether you want to touch more grass or go full-on Luddite, the popularity of offline movements, spaces and events prove you’re not alone. Pulling the plug is causing a stir. So we caught up with some Berliners in the worlds of social media, dating, film and events to hear more about their choice to take a technology break, if not step back entirely.
LET’S GET OUT OF HERE
We’ve all been there. You open Instagram almost by accident, then two hours later, you surface from a video like a deep-sea diver gasping for air, only to feel disoriented and ashamed. There’s a reason you feel like shit when you fall down a Reel hole. It’s not your fault. They’re specifically designed to be addictive, luring you into a Skinner box-like dopamine loop of pull down and reward, pull down and reward. It’s alright though, because only this month, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri declared in a landmark trial that 16 hours of daily Instagram use is “problematic”, sure, but not an addiction.
We might think our usage is different. Or that not engaging counts as not contributing. We might think that the influencer we hate-watch isn’t profiting from our attention because we don’t follow them. We are, of course, wrong. Every move you make is monetised: how long you watch, how much you watch, how often you re-watch, average watch time, if you share what you watch… Every microsecond you spend on Instagram is ad revenue directly into MAGA Mark’s pocket. “It takes Meta about an hour and 52 minutes to make $50 million in revenue,” former Facebook executive Stephen Scheeler told the Australian Associated Press. We’re a product the moment we open the app. The only way to stop is by removing ourselves entirely.
Well, that’s exactly what Berlin’s naked drag queen rockstar, Bleach, has done.
In their blogpost, ‘Goodbye Instagram’, they explain their reason for doing so, outlining the cognitive dissonance of using Instagram to promote art. “I’ve been watching parties pay instagram for adverts. Paying a multinational corporation [avoiding] tax and adamant on supporting right wing politics,” they write. “Paying those that expect us to be so happy we give our art away for free. Paying the devil to play their game.” For a person who widely criticises capitalism through their art, it only makes sense to take a step back.
At the beginning of 2026, Bleach joined the Instajump campaign to encourage Instagram users to jump off the platform. The initiative claims that the app is more addictive than ever, “driven by advertisement and data sales to consume more and more of your attention”. But more than that, it emphasises the real-world significance of art and solidarity. On the website, it writes, “We chose to not give our creative output for free to a multinational corporation in 2026. We chose to direct our energy back into the real-life community.”
The philosophy aligns perfectly with Bleach’s intention, inspired by reading books like Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism and Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con. Bleach writes that the insidiousness of big tech is “clear when I perform and people’s first reaction is to reach for their telephone, over scream. It’s clear in our hunched necks and pained wrists. It’s clear in how poor we are whilst billionaires live off our misery.” Instead, Bleach has contributed their energy to a more hopeful outlet, a late-night culture zine called Spat!, and they voice an excitement to start a new, offline venture: “one [embedded] in real life. In creating culture. Allowing things to grow in the dark, not on constant display. Allowing [the] mystic into our lives. The effort to find something. The magic of finding something.”
Instajump now has nearly 100 sign-ups, but it’s a far cry from Instagram’s three billion users. Leaving social media is more complex than just deleting an app. For many of us, it’s weaved into our everyday lives. We depend upon it to find a restaurant we saved or message a friend on the other side of the world. It’s scary to realise when you scroll through your Stories Archive (to help you remember that thing that happened that one day): you’ve given half your life to Instagram. Such movements as Instajump should probably be supplemented with in-person meetings to help us transition to an off-Instagram reality and enact the message summarised in the caption of Bleach’s final Instagram post: “JUMP JUMP STAGE DIVE INTO LIFE!”
LET’S MEET IRL
Fortunately, in-person events that support a break from the online world are already in full swing. The Offline Club Berlin is part of a larger movement that began in Amsterdam in 2024 when two colleagues, co-founders Jordan and Ilya, challenged themselves to go without devices for four days. They loved it. But they knew that it wasn’t accessible for most people, time-wise and money-wise, to go off-grid for days at a time. Instead, their events offer a part-time opportunity to digitally detox.
Now The Offline Club has clubs in 20 cities, from Bristol to Bali, including the one run by Isik in Berlin. For her, it’s all about finding a community offline. “When I moved here in 2021, we were still in the heavy COVID times. Everything was highly digitalised. I needed a place to meet new people and build deeper, off-screen connections.” Now, she organises events where people can meet face to face and take a break from technology through events like reading sessions, bonfires, forest walks and dinner parties.
Often, their weekly offline hangout takes place at Café Vegardie in Prenzlauer Berg. When you walk in, you hand your phone to Shai, who slots it into a fridge-like safe under lock and key, then gives you a counter to collect it three hours later. The first hour is quiet solo time. Isik lays out a selection of activities on the bar: an origami book, crayons, a Rubix cube. Some do a jigsaw puzzle. Some write. Others stare at a wall. But most people just read.
The next hour is social time, facilitated by conversation prompts on the tables. There’s a common, but by no means exclusive, demographic: 25-45, women, international. Many of them are new to Berlin and looking for connection. “I looked up ways to meet new people,” says Maya, who moved here in October. “Getting off my phone is an extra benefit. I find it hard to read at home without getting distracted.” For others, it’s less about social time and more about the excuse to lock away their phone. Anna says she implements ‘digital-detox ceremonies’ at home but prefers the facilitation of The Offline Club events. One woman brought a friend who “believes all visuals are superior to the written word”. She’d challenged him to sit still for one whole hour with a book. “Of course, I could do this at home,” one of the few German men there told us. “But that’s the thing – I don’t.”
At the end, Isik facilitates a round of tip-giving, where people share how they reduce their online consumption. Most recommend small changes: turn off notifications, go for phone-free walks, buy a watch, buy an alarm clock. But for Isik, one big life change led to more offline time: adopting a Turkish stray called Zeena. “I don’t interact with my phone so much when my dog is around. He inspired me to leave it at home when we go for walks. I mean, I try to. No one is perfect.”
That’s the whole point of The Offline Club. It’s not about perfection. It’s not about extremes or an anti-technology overhaul. “It’s about redefining how we use technology,” Isik explained. “It’s a balance. It’s about normalising talking to strangers and prioritising real-life connections over digital interaction.” Still, The Offline Club has an Instagram following of 599k. The irony of using online platforms to promote offline events is not lost on Isik. She acknowledges the need to meet people where they are. “I struggled with it in the beginning, but I understand that even an offline community must have an online touch point. Still, we don’t need a perfectly polished Instagram account.”
The Offline Club hangout might only last for three hours, but the effect lingers. By the end, you might not want to turn your phone back on to re-enter the other world. You might walk towards home without headphones in and enjoy how your footprints crunch on the snow, then jump on the tram and notice, maybe for the first time, how every single person around you is staring at a screen.
LET’S GET PHYSICAL
Back in the day, screens were a limited novelty. It wasn’t until the introduction of the household television in the 1950s that screens became an everyday occurrence, then with the iPhone launch in 2007 that screens became a ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives. But for some, the context of how and when we engage with screens is a huge one.
Silvio owns Filmgalerie, a DVD rental shop in Mitte – yes, they still exist. Walking between floor-to-ceiling shelves of plastic-wrapped movie spines feels like stepping back in time. You might have assumed that streaming killed the DVD star, but the shop still pulls in a remarkably consistent customer base. Their demographic isn’t spectacular, it’s just incredibly diverse. “Young and old, craftspeople, professors, filmmakers – everything,” Silvio says. “It’s surprising how much interest there still is, especially among younger people.”
While DVD sales are not exactly on the rise, their decline is slowing. According to The Washington Post, “DVDs and CDs are becoming cool again, thanks mostly to Gen Z”. Sales fell just 3% in 2025, compared with almost 26% the previous year. Silvio says that’s because there’s a “growing collector’s market, similar to the vinyl revival”.
You read that right. DVDs are vintage now.
After the golden years of the 2000s, most DVD rental stores shut up shop. Now there are only two left in Berlin: Filmgalerie in Mitte and Videodrom in Kreuzberg. From 7,000 video stores nationwide at their peak, fewer than 50 remain today. Sylvio assumes that it’s customer support that keeps them alive: “One customer rented 900 films in a year. Others barely rent anything but keep their membership just to support us.” However, at least additionally to cinephile philanthropy, the reason is likely the rising complaint of streaming fatigue.
Simply put, people are getting fed up with the platforms designed to entertain them. Along with rising
costs of memberships, streaming fatigue relates to the weariness of finding something to watch when overwhelmed by too many apps. With content spread across Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+ and more, it’s no wonder that the practice of churning – using one streaming platform for a month, then cancelling and moving on to another – is so popular. Our mistrust of large streaming companies shines through in our spending habits. Octane Seating’s 2025 survey declared that 40% of people still buy physical media at least in part “in case streaming platforms remove them”.
In May, Silvio will celebrate 25 years of renting films in Berlin, both in physical copies and through an online database. “We now have almost 30,000 titles. No streaming service comes anywhere close.” He’s right. Netflix Germany hosts roughly 7,300 titles. Additionally, Filmgalerie offers a membership for an annual flat rate of €144 a year. That’s €23 cheaper than a standard (no ads) Netflix membership at €167 per year. As Sylvio says, “Streaming services push recommendations from a limited pool.” But Filmgalerie offers something that Netflix can’t buy: “Here, everything stays. That freedom of choice is the real value.”
With around two-thirds of Germans paying for at least one subscription service, the golden days of streaming feel far from over. The breakthrough promise of Netflix was that you could watch a film whenever you wanted, without having to wait for a screening or a programmed schedule. It allowed you to watch films fast. But as slowness movements take root, perhaps that’s not the hook it used to be. So if you fancy stepping outside and embracing the tactility of it all: the feeling of holding, if not a blade of grass, then a physical DVD in your fingers, at least there’s one place you can go. “You go in, you look around, you rummage and you’re surprised by what you suddenly hold in your hands,” says Sylvio. “That’s a very important thing.”
Makar Artemev. Silvio, owner of Filmgalerie, has a collection of 30,000 film titles, four times that of Netflix Germany
LET’S TAKE THIS OFFLINE
Streaming fatigue isn’t the only fatigue we’re facing. Over in the world of dating, the tireless swiping, chatting, meeting, deleting is also losing its momentum. At the end of last year, Tinder had 9.2 million paying users, 7% less than the same period in 2024. According to Mark Kantor, Tinder’s head of product, the decline is synonymous with the trends of young daters, who want more from the apps than just swipes. “Gen Z wants to connect authentically. They believe in romance. They’re open to serendipity,” he told the LA Times. “They’re hopeful, but they want to go beyond just the photo experience.”
Lulu Johnson is the host of the Berlin-based comedy podcast Dating, Laughter & Disasters and Annika Sanchez runs IRL group-based meet-ups that decentralise the one-on-one pressure of apps and speed dating, for example, through an ice breaker game or round of Twister. Together, they organise Dating Weekender, an event series that includes panels of relationship-coach advice and ‘Date Better’ workshops in a space “beyond endless swipes, ghosting and algorithmic love”. According to them, dating app fatigue is a very real thing. In fact, it inspired the name of Annika’s meet-up: Overdated. “People are exhausted by it,” she told us. “I mean, the amount of admin required, it feels like another thing to deal with in your life that you don’t really have the energy for, with continuously diminishing returns.”
As the apps lose steam, the lure of modern dating events is picking up. “You cut out the bullshit when you go to a singles event,” says Annika. “It’s like, here you are in front of me. Do I like your energy? Do I like your smell? Do I like your look?” Just like The Offline Club, offline dating events allow people an allocated time and space to be 100% present. “Any reason to not be on my phone is great. Our generation is wrecked from being on our phones for everything. It’s nice to just meet people in the flesh and, you know, take a break from being online.”
But it’s also about escaping the limitations of the apps. Just like Instagram, Tinder uses an algorithm to find out what (or who) you like – and beats you over the head with it. But when you meet someone IRL, Annika says, “it’s a bit of a reality check that you can connect with someone who is not your type physically. Because let’s be honest, when you swipe someone online, you swipe on looks.”
Of course, love stories ensue. Couples are still together today thanks to Outdated’s matchmaking. But Lulu and Annika believe in a more important intention than finding a relationship. “People have become so antisocial over the years,” Lulu says. “We forgot how to socialise. We’re missing something in the apps. People are missing connection.” For many of their guests, dating is an excuse to stretch their social muscle – something Annika claims we’ve forgotten how to do in our online bubbles. Her events are far from goal oriented. Instead, they centre on two key aspects: fun and – particularly lacking from our digital experience – authenticity. “We’re all scared to talk to anyone because we’re afraid of rejection,” Annika says, but you can only be yourself at one of these dating events; if you’re playing Twister with someone, your ass is in the air for everyone to see.
Talking to Isik, Sylvio, Annika and Lulu, you can’t help but notice a pattern of common threads: anti-socialness, disconnection, loneliness. “The most touching feedback for me is when people say our events reduce their loneliness,” Isik told us. “With so many screens in our lives, we feel like we’re more connected, but we’re not. It’s just a distraction from real connection, and it takes away our time and attention.”
Still, it’s not all bad, is it? Memes, video calls across the world, instant knowledge, infinite dog pics, immediate language translation, digital maps: these are internet miracles! Despite the dire statistics, the online world is likely a bittersweet grey area that, like most things in life, holds a complex contradiction of good and evil. In the end, it’s a balance. And perhaps our relationship with tech could better emulate that balance. “I don’t think the apps will die,” Lulu told us; it’s about “the complementarity between the apps and real-life events”. Small, sustainable changes are more effective than extremes, than affectatious, empty promises of living a device-free, Walden-like existence or the ironic romanticisation of trending, off-the-grid lifestyles (#vanlife #homesteading #cottagecore), which are often problematic products in themselves.
There was a time before we knew what online even meant. Not just for pre-90s kids, for all of us. As Annika phrased it, “Do you remember being a child? Just being young and having a laugh with strangers and playing with kids that you didn’t know? Then suddenly you’re an adult, and it’s all a bit scary. But, without getting too philosophical about it, we’re all kids at the end of the day being forced to be adults, right?” Going off Instagram, renting a DVD and meeting a stranger to play Twister in real life might not change our lives (or it might!). But if nothing else, those acts entice us back to the real world and invite us to pay attention – to each other, to the crunch of snow and to the grass at our fingertips.
Five Tips for Unplugging
1. Turn off notifications
You might think you need to know the moment a message has arrived on your phone, but you really don’t. You can open and reply to your messages in your own time. Nothing is really that urgent. If it is, someone will call you. Free yourself from this heinous design feature from hell.
2. Charge your phone in another room while you sleep
Sure, you’ll probably need to buy an alarm clock, but it will be so worth it. Most of us check our phones first thing in the morning and last thing at night (and those who say they don’t are liars). The easy solution? Leave it in a different room. And if you sleepwalk to it in the middle of the night, then you know you have a full-blown problem.
3. Put your phone display in greyscale
App icons are purposefully colourful, designed to grab your attention and keep it. Switching to greyscale removes that physiological pull to touch a button for the sake of it. The withdrawal of colour makes your phone less stimulating, reducing the amount of time you spend on it and reducing the anxiety you feel afterwards.
4. Monitor your screen time and aim to reduce it
Have you ever used a tracking app to monitor your screen time and actually looked at it? Probably not. Because it’s fucking horrifying. “Daily average of 6.5 hours screen, up 500% from last week, schedule time away, you’re a mess, you’re wasting your life.” It’s confronting, to say the least. But if you monitor it and face the truth, you can make steps to reduce it.
5. Go for a phone-free walk
Leaving your phone behind on a walk feels uneasy. But the more often you do it, the easier it becomes. You get used to interacting directly with the world instead of refracting an experience through your phone. Because it’s not just about reducing the harm of screen time, but replacing it with something that’s good for you instead.
