There are countless teachers, organizations and advocates trying to help Generation Z and Generation Alpha escape from the addictive trap of smartphones and social media. They are fighting against fearful overprotection, pushing to get phones out of schools, and urging parents to delay social media access until at least age 16. They are on a mission to save childhood.

But what about those of us who already lost ours?

Generation Z includes everyone born between 1996 through 2012, now aged from 12 to 29. It’s easy to focus on the younger half—those who can still have a phone-free childhood, who haven’t yet gone through puberty. For them, there’s hope ahead.

But what about the older half of Gen Z, like us? The young adults who already wasted so many of our school days on our phones? Who already watched our friendships become shallow and superficial? Whose fond childhood memories include Facetuning our prepubescent faces and bodies, talking to naked strangers on Omegle, putting our self-worth into likes and follows through our most formative and vulnerable years? Who were exposed to online porn before we even had a first kiss? Who were already overprotected in the real world, and abandoned online?

We are suffering. Almost half of Gen Z wishes platforms like X and TikTok didn’t exist. We are finally finding the words for what happened to us—what watching hardcore porn as children did to our brains, what apps and algorithms did to our attention spans, how we can't even see our own faces properly anymore. We are realizing that this was not normal; this was not a childhood. We stumbled into this world with no age limits, no guardrails, with so little protection. And most young adults we speak to—men, women, from all different backgrounds—react with utter horror at the thought of their future children going through what they did—watching violent porn as pre-teens, objectifying themselves online, even just posting selfies to be ranked and reviewed by strangers.

For our generation, we need to acknowledge what we’ve lost. To grieve a time we never knew. We are the first to try and handle adolescence while performing and marketing ourselves at the same time. The first to never know friendship before it became keeping up SnapStreaks, community before it became Instagram and Reddit forums, or finding love before it became swiping and subscription models. The next generation has a chance, but for us, there’s no getting our adolescence back. This is where we are.

But it doesn’t have to be where we stay.

We can face that loss and turn it into resolve. We still have most of our lives ahead of us. It feels as if everyone is looking at young adults today and asking what have we done? Now it’s time for what can be done. We have grieved a time we never knew; now it’s time to build something new. We have mourned what we have lost; time to take back what we are worth.

What follows is a guide, developed with the help of Gabriela Nguyen from Appstinence, and Seán Killingsworth from Reconnect, for the millions of us who are ready for change but have been afraid or wrestled with it, and want to reclaim life in the real world, together. We believe in starting small - first minimizing use, then working toward complete freedom.