Dlet’s get a truth straight away: no one thinks that the World Disconnection Dayensure that tomorrow Italy wakes up without a smartphone. It doesn’t work like that. The Global Day of Unpluggingwhich is celebrated tomorrow 7 March, it is not a diktat nor a penance. It’s an invitation. A collective moment to ask ourselves, honestly, how much of one’s day truly belongs to oneself and how much has instead been silently given over to a screen. The answer, for most Italians, is uncomfortable. Six hours a day. Everyday.
Unplug Day: A screen-free day. If you can
According to the Digital 2025 report by We Are Social and Meltwater, in Italy there are over 43 million users on social networks who connect, share and communicate online and, as anticipated, the average time each of them spends online exceeds six hours a day. The smartphone with constant access to the internet and applications, it is the main device: by the majority is checked within five minutes of waking upoften keeping it on my bedside table at night with notifications on.
Hyperconnection is not a question of age
Attachment to devices does not depend on generation or social status. It’s about the kidsCertain, but also fifty-year-old professionalspensioners on WhatsApp, parents who document every moment of their children’s lives on Instagram. The hyperconnection is transversal. And with smart working, agile remote working, the distinction between work time and free time has almost dissolved: the same laptop is used for the morning meeting, for Netflix in the evening and for work messages that arrive at any time.
Disconnection Day turns fifteen. In Italy 43 million users active on social media, smartphones always in hand. (Getty Images)
Smartphone addiction?
AGCOM, the Communications Authority which regulates the media and telecommunications sector in Italy, has repeatedly reported how smartphone addiction is becoming a public health problem. There’s even a clinical term: nomophobiathe irrational fear of being without a phone or connection. And it concerns increasingly larger segments of the population.
The discovery of the scroll and its consequences
Let’s say that the platforms are not innocent in all this. Their design works by exploiting the mechanisms of dopamine, the neurotransmitter linked to pleasure and reward. Every notification, every like, every new video in the feed, it’s a little rush of gratification that keeps you coming back. And the infinite scroll was designed with the explicit intention of eliminating any natural interruption. Just one detail: inventing it it was Aza Raskin in 2006, which he later publicly regrettedestimating that this mechanism alone generates approximately 200,000 hours of unintentional use every day in the world with the consequence of causing higher levels of anxiety, as well as FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, the fear of missing something, the anguish of being cut off from events and conversations that others are experiencing.
But there is a new trend: disappearing from social media
However, there is some news. Just this year a very interesting phenomenon came onto the scene: the trend today is not to make more content, grow on TikTok or become influencers, the content creators who guide the tastes and purchases of their followers. The trend is to stop. Reduce. Disappearat least in part.
They call it different things, digital detox, digital detoxor, in the most decisive form, social media quittingthe abandonment of platforms.
What’s happening
Data from GWI, the Global Web Index research company that studies online behavior, shows that the percentage of Italians who have significantly reduced the use of at least one social network has grown steadily in the last two years. The most involved group they are the Millennials and Generation Zthat is, who built these platforms and inhabited them from the beginning. The reasons are concrete: protect mental health, make time for real relationshipsescape the logic of permanent performance.
Deinfluencing, soft life and going ghost
On a cultural level, this trend has precise names. There is de-influencing: a movement born on TikTok in which creators invite their followers not to buy, to resist trends, not to be guided by marketing. The paradox is intentional, a social network is used to invite people to use social media less, but the message is genuine. There is soft lifea philosophy born in online black American communities that favors lightness and rest over the cult of productivity at all costs. On social media it translates into less content, less frequency, more silence. Silence, paradoxically, has become a content. And then there are those who simply choose the going ghost: make your profile private, stop posting, leave a platform without announcements or explanations. Those who do so describe the experience as liberating.
The platforms respond with a paradox
The big platforms they responded to the flight of users with digital wellbeing toolssuch as daily usage limits and break reminders. They exist, but almost no one really uses them. The reason is structural: the same algorithms that suggest detaching are designed to keep you glued. In Europe, the DSA, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Services Regulation which came into force in 2023, tries to put some regulatory brakes, imposing more transparency and responsibility on the platforms. But the road is still long.
Disconnection day, then, does it go out or not?
Meanwhile, tomorrow is March 7th. And what we do will depend on us. You don’t need to turn everything off for twenty-four hours or delete every account. Perhaps it would be enough to start noticing how often you pick up your phone without a specific reason or how many times a day do you check something you weren’t looking for. Disconnection Day is an invitation: to keep your phone in the drawer for an evening, to look a person in the eye without waiting for the next notification. To get bored, every now and then, without necessarily having to fill the void.
