Back in January, I wrote about physical media, my little A5 zine, and how BookTok has helped push book sales to record highs. I love reading. My shelves are stacked, and I’m still finding myself on the Waterstones app looking for more.
However, these days I spend more time watching other people talk about books on TikTok than I do actually reading them.
It usually happens when my mood is low. I’ll pick up my phone “just for a minute”, tell myself I’m looking for my next read, and before I know it I’ve watched reading vlogs and “books that will change your life” recommendations for far longer than I’d ever admit. The book I meant to read is still waiting. I’ve spent the evening consuming content about reading instead of reading.
At one point I downloaded an app called Opal, a screen time tool that blocks the apps you choose, because I’d noticed social media was, in fact, making me feel low. It worked for a while. Then it didn’t. I’m not great at setting boundaries for myself, and an app can only do so much when you’re the one who keeps tapping “just five more minutes”.
I’m not alone in this. In fact, the research says I’m very much part of the mood of 2026.
The Mood of 2026: Angry, Anxious, and Split in Two
In 2022, ITV Media published a report called What Unites A Kingdom, looking at the cultural codes that hold Britain together. The 2026 edition revisits those codes and paints a picture of a country under strain. 79% of Brits believe we are becoming angry as a society, and the research describes “a growing sense of anger, stress, and self-preservation” in the national mood.
Money is a big part of it. PwC describes UK consumers as living through “a K-shaped recovery”, with “a clear split between those who have headroom and those who don’t”. Some of us are spending on premium treats; others are trading down on everything. And with another budget looming, Barclays found that 68% of people are worried about its impact on their household finances, with 30% already cutting back on non-essential spending.
When the world outside feels loud, expensive, and unpredictable, what do people do? They pull the blinds down.
Cocooning: Protecting Our Peace
Back in 1981, the trend forecaster Faith Popcorn coined a term for this exact behaviour: cocooning. She defined it as “the need to protect oneself from the harsh, unpredictable realities of the outside world”. In the 1980s and 90s, that meant VHS night, takeaways, and the rise of the home as a sanctuary.
Forty-five years later, we’re cocooning again, but the threat has changed. It isn’t only the outside world we’re hiding from. It’s the noise coming through our phones.
ITV calls the 2026 version “Protecting Our Peace”. People are retreating into smaller circles and focusing on what feels close, safe, and manageable:
- 46% of people are trying to reduce the amount they share online
- 7 in 10 say having a routine is important to them
I recognise myself in all of this. I’ve made a conscious effort to do more with my small circle of friends. I play offline video games. I’m trying, slowly, to pick up my book instead of my phone, and I’m trying to make my home a place of peace and comfort.
The interesting twist is that cocooning in 2026 isn’t the same as staying in alone. Barclays’ latest figures show bars, pubs, and clubs growing for four months in a row, and spending on digital content and subscriptions up 7.8%. We’re not hiding from everything. We’re being choosier about where we spend our time, energy, and money.
Sludge, Slop, and Rage Bait
So why does the phone feel so loud? Partly because online culture now moves faster than any of us can keep up with.
Ant Firth-Clark at M+C Saatchi calls this “the frantically shifting era of sludge and slop”. Trend cycles that used to last a season now last days. By the time a trend reaches your For You page, the people who started it already think it’s cringe. His prediction going forward is that “we’ll no longer be able to predict anything”.
That speed is what makes a TikTok spiral so easy. There’s always another recommendation, another “top 10”, another trend to catch before it disappears. The content never ends, so you never reach a natural place to stop.
And a lot of it is designed to wind us up. Oxford University Press named “rage bait” its Word of the Year for 2025, defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage”. Its usage roughly tripled in a single year. Research agency MTM describes a tension between rage and joy: divisive content “optimises engagement”, but audiences are also drawn to content that is “less rage-fuelled and more playful”. Those adverts where the player on the screen can never get the simple puzzle right or save the king before the giant snake eats him because they’re matching the coloured blocks too slow? Yeah.
The formats are changing too. MTM points to the rise of micro-dramas, bite-sized series built for scrolling, and to creators pulling audiences away from traditional media. For example, German football’s Bundesliga agreed to broadcast 20 live matches on Mark Goldbridge’s That’s Football YouTube channel. As MTM puts it, if legacy media wants these audiences, it “needs to come to them”.
Put that together with an anxious, angry national mood, and it’s no wonder so many of us are reaching for the mute button.
Honesty Over Politeness, and the AI Poster Problem
Britain has a reputation for politeness, for keeping calm and carrying on and not making a fuss. ITV’s research suggests that’s shifting. Honesty is now the number one value people want to see promoted, with a growing appetite for transparency and emotional realism.
You can see that frustration everywhere. Attest’s 2026 UK consumer trends report found that 84% of shoppers respond negatively to shrinkflation, and 55% have been auto-renewed into a subscription without their consent. Ticketing has become a lightning rod too. After the Oasis reunion pricing row, Ticketmaster gave undertakings to the Competition and Markets Authority, and the government has since announced plans to cap ticket resale prices.
For me, I’m done with the AI posters on Facebook. Community events, hiring posters: more and more of them have that unmistakable AI look. Too smooth, slightly off, cartoony/painted, with repeated fonts and bright colours. They’re meant to be about real people and real places, which is exactly why they feel so jarring.
I’m not the only one. A Gartner survey published in September 2026 found that 65% of consumers think brands are producing too much AI-generated content, and 57% say it has made them trust brand messaging less. 43% now rely more on real people for recommendations. It’s a US survey, but I’d be surprised if Britain felt any different.
There’s a link here back to cocooning. If you can’t trust what you see online, you retreat to what you can trust: the people you actually know, and the places you can actually visit.
Logging Off (and Why It Doesn’t Stick)
If so many of us are fed up, why don’t we delete the apps?
Plenty of people are trying. Deloitte’s Digital Consumer Trends research found in its 2025 survey that one in five UK consumers had deleted a social media app in the previous 12 months, rising to 29% of Gen Z. Half have turned off notifications for at least one app. Deloitte’s Paul Lee puts it simply: “Consumers appear to have grown fatigued with their devices, apps, and experiences”.
The fatigue has reached Westminster. In June 2026 the government has announced a ban on social media for under-16s, covering platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube, due to take effect by spring 2027. Even among Gen Z, more than half (53%) support the idea, according to Deloitte.
But wanting to log off and actually logging off are two very different things. My Opal experiment is proof of that. These platforms are designed to be easy to come back to, and the moments we reach for, tired, bored, or feeling low, are exactly the moments are willpower is weakest.
That’s the real tension of 2026. We know the scroll isn’t good for us. We’re tired of the noise, the slop, and the rage. But the cocoon we retreat into is very often the same phone that’s causing the problem.
Where We Go Instead: The New Third Places
In 1989, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote The Great Good Place, about what he called “third places”. Home is the first place, work is the second, and the third places are the informal spots where people gather by choice: the café, the pub, the barber’s. In his words, “third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places”.
When people step away from their screens, many are looking for exactly this. The difference in 2026 is what those third places look like.
The Run Club
Running has become a social scene in its own right. More than 1.1 million people entered the ballot for the 2026 London Marathon, a world record, and over a third of the entries came from people aged 18 to 29. Strava also recorded a 59% rise in running club participation in 2024 (Hybrid).
The Lido and the Sauna
VisitBritain’s consumer trends report picks out “Cold Water Culture”, with cold dips, lidos, and wild swimming at places like Hampstead Ponds, Bristol Lido, and Victoria Baths in Manchester, and urban saunas and bathhouses as “social wellness hubs offering shared relaxation, conversation, and ritual”. They’re still emerging trends rather than the mainstream, but they fit the mood perfectly: calm, social, and offline. I guess the Romans really were onto something.
The Alcohol-Free Round and the Smaller Plate
Going out doesn’t have to mean drinking. Drinkaware figures show 49% of young adults now choose no- and low alcohol drinks to moderate their drinking, up from 28% in 2018. Meanwhile, weight-loss medication is changing how the country eats: 6.3% of households in Great Britain now include a GLP-1 user, and those households have cut their grocery spending by £780m.
The Big Shared Moment
In a fragmented culture, ITV found that big sporting events remain one of the strongest uniting forces we have. With the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this summer, 2026 has had plenty of those. So is screen tourism: VisitBritain’s “Starring GREAT Britain” campaign, which used film and TV series like Wuthering Heights and Bridgerton to draw visitors, generated an extra £217m in visitors’ spend in its first six months.
The common thread? All these are experiences you have to be there for, with other people, that an algorithm cannot recreate.
Protecting Our Peace X Marketing
So, from a business’s or marketer’s perspective, what do we do with a public that is anxious, sceptical, and trying to log off?
- Respect People’s Peace: If your audience is trying to scroll less, more content isn’t the answer. Better content is. Post less often if it means every post is worth stopping for. Send fewer emails, but make each one useful.
- Be Honest and Be Specific: Honesty is the value people most want to see. Show your real prices, including fees, up front. Avoid PR-speak. If something has changed, such as a price, a pack size, or a menu, say so before your customers notice.
- Keep it Human: Use real photos of your real team, your real venue, and your real customers. If you use AI in your process, that’s fine, but don’t let it become the face of your brand. A slightly imperfect photo of a real community event will always beat a polished AI poster that looks like it could be anywhere.
- Build the Third Place: Give people a reason to come together offline: a run club that ends at your café, a quiet reading night, a tasting, a workshop, a screening. We cover how to plan these in our guide to brand activations.
- More Room for the Alcohol-Free and the Smaller Appetite: For hospitality brands in particular, good low- and no alcohol options and lighter menus are no longer a niche. They’re how a growing part of your audience wants to go out.
- Be Ready to Move Fast, But Don’t Chase Everything: Trends now live and die in days. Pick the moments that fit your brand, and let the rest pass. Nobody needs another brand jumping on a trend that’s already cringe.
- Bring Joy, Not Rage: Rage bait might get engagement, but it doesn’t build affection. In a year where 79% of people think we’re getting angrier, the brands that make people smile are the ones they’ll remember.
Closing The App
I still fall down the occasional TikTok hole when I’m feeling low. I’m not good at self-boundaries, and there are still books waiting for me to stop watching videos about books.
But I do think 2026 is the year a lot of us started to notice. We noticed how angry the feed makes us. We noticed the AI posters. We noticed that the things that make us feel better- our small circle of friends, an offline video game, or a few chapters of an actual book- all happen away from the digital noise.
Protecting your peace isn’t about running away from the world. It’s about choosing which parts of it we let in. For brands, that’s a challenge and an opportunity: be one of the things people choose to let in.