Gen Z Is Turning Its Phones Black and White

In August of 1939, a film flickered to life in theaters across the country.

It opened the way most films did then. In black and white. Sepia, really. A gray Kansas farm, a gray sky, a girl named Dorothy and her little dog.

Then the storm comes. A tornado lifts the farmhouse off the ground and drops it somewhere new. Dorothy crosses the room, puts her hand on the door, and pushes it open.

And the world turns to color leaving the audience spellbound, awe-struck.

Not a tint. Not a wash. Full, saturated, three-strip Technicolor. Munchkinland in greens and golds and impossible reds, brighter than anything waiting outside the theater.

The Wizard of Oz did not invent color film. But it staged the arrival of color as a revelation. For a generation raised on black and white pictures, watching that doorway bloom was something close to magic.

We have been letting color in ever since. First onto the movie screen. Then into the living room, when television turned from black and white to color. Now into our pockets, on screens that glow and pulse from morning to night.

And somewhere along the way, it seems we have had our fill of it.

Ironically, it was on the full-color screen in my own pocket that a black and white image stopped me cold.

The Wizard of Oz carried the world from black and white into color. This was running the film backward.

It was a split photo. On top, a row of cars from the late 1950s, parked along a palm-lined street. Soft mint green. Powder blue. Butter yellow. Coral pink. The kind of pastel you now have to fly to Miami or Havana to find. Below it, an ordinary parking lot. White, black, a little silver, a little gray.

Two rows of cars, sixty years apart. The caption said, “America is losing its color.”

It was show-stopping when Judy Garland first stepped into a world of color. So, I had to know is this post real, or just another Instagram gimmick? Because, as we all know, everything you see on social media is rock-solid fact.

So I did what I usually do. I went looking for the numbers.

Much to my surprise, they held up. By 2024, roughly four out of five new passenger cars worldwide were white, black, gray, or silver (BASF, 2024). 

In American bathrooms today, white and off-white together make up about seventy percent of countertop choices (Houzz, 2024). So long green toilets of the 70s. Ask painters what sells a house, and neutrals win in a landslide (Fixr, 2024). The most visible, most expensive, most permanent surfaces of ordinary life have drifted toward palettes that take no risk.

Then I looked at my own life, and it had lost its color too. The cars my wife and I drive are white. When we built our house, we built it quiet. A neutral exterior. White walls. Counters nearly bare. The best compliment anyone who visits ever pays us is how minimal it all is. There is a name for what happened to my house, and to a lot of houses like it. Millennial minimalism.

So that Instagram post actually had some merit. American life seems to be going colorless. It made me wonder not whether it is happening, but why. Is this just a design trend, the way avocado kitchens were once a design trend? Or is something underneath it?

We have overwhelmed ourselves. With stuff. With color. With noise. With phones, with screens, with information. We have piled it on until the pile itself became the problem.

The same screens that gave us the color gave us the notifications, the autoplay, the feed that never reaches the bottom. The volume of modern life went up, and it has not come back down.

People feel it, and the data proves it. In one national survey, 71% of Americans said they experience overstimulation, and the youngest carry the heaviest load. Eighty-five percent of Gen Z reported it, nearly twice the rate of Boomers at 47% (Best Therapies, 2026). The American Psychological Association found that 92% of Gen Z adults reported a stress-related symptom in the previous month (APA, 2023). About half of American teenagers now spend more than 4 hours a day on screens outside of schoolwork (CDC, 2023).

A generation raised in the cluttered, color chaos is signaling something. It is reaching for the off switch.

Here is what is fascinating. Some people, particularly Gen Z, are setting their phones to grayscale on purpose. They are going black and white on their iPhones. And the research says it works. 

Students who switched their screens to black and white used them about 40 minutes less per day, with the steepest drops in social media (Holte & Ferraro, 2020). A later study found that a single week of grayscale lowered both screen time and stress (Dekker & Baumgartner, 2024). The mechanism is almost insultingly simple. Bright color is the reward. Take it away, and the phone stops paying out. The slot machine goes dark.

I know that pull firsthand. A good share of the conferences I am invited to speak at are held in Las Vegas, and I dodge as many as I politely can. Nothing against the people. Some of my closest friends live there, and the desert outside the city is beautiful. But the Strip, a wall of blinking slot machines, engineered noise, and pumped-in scent, is the most overstimulating room I know. 

Others are trading smartphones for flip phones, scheduling dopamine detoxes, dimming whatever they can reach. One report found Gen Z is the only age group actively shrinking its digital footprint (PYMNTS Intelligence, 2024).  It’s like the dopamine hits Michaeleen Doucleff and I talked about in last week’s podcast episode. 

The white room and the dim gray phone may be the same instinct, aimed at two different screens. When the input will not stop, you turn down the part you can.

Millennial minimalism was only the first move. Now, Gen Z has taken it to the next level.

Over the past two years they built a whole movement around buying less and gave it a name: underconsumption core. Using what you already own, repairing instead of replacing, finishing the bottle before you buy the next one (McKinsey & Company, 2024). 

And it is not just talk. Gen Z cut its overall spending by about 13% in early 2025, with the sharpest pullback in clothing, accessories, and electronics (PwC, 2025). The look of all of it is deliberately quiet. Fewer things, fewer colors, less noise.

The reasons do not separate cleanly. Some of it is money, a generation that says it cannot justify the splurge. Some of it is exhaustion with being sold to every waking minute. And some of it is older than any of them.

If you’re a Millennial, you were trained for this before you knew it.

You might remember the story of a barge that set out in 1987 loaded with thousands of tons of New York trash, looking for a landfill to take it. Port after port turned it away. It spent months wandering the coast with nowhere to dump its load while the whole country watched, and we did not like what we saw. That same year, New Jersey passed the first law in the nation requiring people to recycle (Northeast Recycling Council, 2024).

The blue and green bins showed up everywhere after that. Reduce, reuse, recycle stopped being a slogan and became a staple slogan of childhood. And the waste it warned about was real. Americans still throw out more than 11 million tons of clothing a year and recycle less than 15% of it (EPA, 2018). 

Even the toys got heavy. In 2021, McDonald's, which sells more than a billion Happy Meals a year, promised to strip most of the plastic out of its toys, crediting a petition started by two schoolgirls (McDonald's, 2021).

A generation taught that more was the problem grew up wanting less. The minimalism was never only about taste.

There are two different ways to perceive all of this.

One is peace. A culture finally turning down the volume, choosing less, learning to rest.

The other is avoidance. People so overwhelmed that they have started shutting off whatever they can reach, the color included, because one more input is one too many.

I am not arguing a case for causation or correlation here. I am just unpacking a social media trend. But the difference is worth sitting with. A bare white room can mean someone made space to think. It can also mean someone could not take the noise. The same grayscale screen reads as discipline in one hand and exhaustion in the other. Before we hand all this restraint a trophy for good taste (as much as the Millennials would appreciate the trophy), it is worth asking which one we are looking at.

I was sitting with that question on my porch the last night, my youngest beside me. At that moment, out in nature, She had no interest in screens or counters or color trends. She found a patch of dirt, scooped up a handful, and grinned at it like it was the most interesting thing in the world.

Brown. Plain. Alive. Not on a screen, and not drained away. Just color, in her hand, the oldest kind there is. And thank goodness she didn’t shove it in her mouth!

We once sat in the dim monochrome theater, the only colors emanated from the starry night painted on the ceiling and the signature red velvet curtains. That same theater than gasped when a door swung open onto a world full of color. Maybe the wonder was never only the color. 

Maybe it was the door. Maybe it was the opening to a brighter tomorrow. But as we know, the grass is not always greener on the other side. Maybe black and white is better than green.