Digital Detox

I’ve recently been listening to the podcast Untold: The Retreat, about an intensive form of meditation, called Vipassana, and those who became addicted to it: suffering breaks from reality, psychosis and chronic insomnia as a result of attending retreats. The podcast is, if not biased, a little weighted in favour of the story. But still, it is convincing on how retreats in which eye contact and speaking are banned, and ten hour meditation sessions are enforced, is not necessarily good for everyone. 

It made me think of a retreat in a similar vein I attended, over a decade ago now (!). It was marketed as an “Unplugged Weekend”: a “digital detox”. At the time I did not want a digital detox. I wanted to annihilate myself through my phone; scroll Twitter until my eyes bled. But the digital detox was run by a friend of a friend, and the friend wanted to go, had a discount, and it felt like something I should want to do, as a single, professional woman in my late twenties.

The weekend was located in the Welsh countryside. On the train ride down I learned my ex-boyfriend’s dad had died. I had known him for the best part of a decade. He’d helped me move house many times. He used to pick me up from the airport on the rare occasion I flew somewhere. I once casually mentioned that I had hardly any kitchenware, and the next time I saw him he presented me with an enormous cardboard box filled with things I needed to function and feed myself. “Sainsbury’s had a sale,” he said, handing it over dismissively. I still have a lot of those things now. 

I did not feel entitled to the shock and sadness I felt. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years. I swallowed it down, and went on to the retreat.

The retreat was populated almost exclusively by stressed out single, professional women in their late twenties; women who lived in London; women who spent what felt like a lot of time talking about the various routes they took on the tube. It was the first time I’d ever heard the words “Soho House”. 

We ceremonially handed over our phones the first evening of the retreat, and they were locked up in a big plastic box. The weekend was filled with activities which didn’t exactly pose an attractive alternative to disappearing inside of one’s phone. There was laughter yoga, which was exactly as horrific as it sounds. There was a lot of yoga, generally. I have a problem, I think, with processing form or shapes, which I occasionally suspect is dyspraxia, but which I instead term my “brain problem”, and so the instructor had to keep coming over to correct my position, getting increasingly frustrated as she did. At night we slept in bunk beds in shared accommodation, which meant I barely slept at all. I felt like Adam Scott in Parks & Recreation, face filled with acupuncture needles. This is the most stressed out I’ve ever been in my life!   

One of the last activities was eye gazing, in which we were paired up with strangers, to hold eye contact for a full five minutes, outside in the fresh air. “You’re so lucky,” the last woman I was paired with said to me on breaking eye contact. I have thought about this many times since. What had she seen?! I had felt very angry with her, at the time.

On the train home my friend and I posted a selfie. “You look glowing”, another friend replied. I felt sleep deprived and depressed; achingly alone. 

When I got home I rang my mum, told her about my ex-boyfriend’s dad, promptly bursting into tears, sobbing down the phone; feeling some of the clarity and catharsis that had eluded me during the yoga or the life drawing or the meditation or the “reconnection workshop”. A couple hours later, I messaged someone I’d been speaking to online, asked if they wanted to go see Eleanor Friedberger play that night. And I guess now we live together and have a house and baby and whatever, and I do feel lucky, very much so.