Adventures in Unplugging
Mother Jones · L · trust 50/100
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I’m not sure when my smartphone began to feel like an albatross, when my unease about relying on it devolved into full-blown anxiety that I was frittering away my life on this tiny screen. As if reading my mind, purported solutions to this digital malaise began appearing on the very device that caused my angst, to paraphrase Hemingway, gradually and then suddenly all at once. TikTok influencers, riffing on the trend of “touching grass” instead of scrolling, touted self-guided digital detoxes.
I kept seeing advertisements for Brick—a physical plastic block that, for $59, can turn smartphones into devices that merely call and text. The Opal app directs users to wholesome dopamine hits, like solving math problems, instead of trawling “culprit” destinations like Instagram. Some people are ditching devices altogether in favor of flip phones and meeting up in “Luddite” clubs dedicated to offline pursuits like painting and reading. Goop wellness empire queen Gwyneth Paltrow says she underwent a digital detox to be more “present.”
The digital detox tech market raked in an estimated $3.4 billion globally in the fall of 2025 and is now projected to balloon 15 percent every year.
The smartphone backlash has even reached the corporate world: Companies like Spotify and Dolby have invited keynote speaker Nina Hersher, the founder of Digital Resilience Lab, to talk about device-specific wellness. The digital detox tech market raked in an estimated $3.4 billion globally in the fall of 2025 and is now projected to balloon 15 percent every year.
My own algorithm started serving me marketing materials from wellness retreats featuring digital detoxing—or, in the case of Arizona’s Miraval Resort, “digital mindfulness.” At The Ranch in Malibu, California, guests can expect, in addition to daily massages, to “detox from digital devices.” Such retreats are one of the wellness industry’s fastest-growing sectors, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. report. In just a few days, they seem to promise, they will cleanse you of the virtual residue mucking up your mind.
I went to get a glimpse of a well-reviewed digital detox retreat offered by Golden Door, a posh resort set amid the Merriam Mountain range on the outskirts of San Diego County. I drove there in mid-May and parked near a wooden bridge that arched over a small burbling creek. The heavy scent of jasmine suffused the air. As the highway noise dissipated, I felt my jaw unclench for the first time that day.
The retreat center’s founder, Deborah Szekely, attributed nutritious, fresh food as central to her family surviving the Great Depression. Drawing from this ethos, Golden Door’s program has, since 1958, centered on organic meals shared in a dining room and daily exercise like hiking. These days, it also offers LED treatments, dermaplaning, and an experimental “multisensory” video experience, The Circle , that is modeled after Las Vegas’ Sphere, with live musicians soundtracking a nature film shown on a circular screen under a forest canopy. The lawns are trimmed by a silent robot so as not to disturb the 40 or so weekly guests while they’re unwinding, Golden Door General Manager and COO Kathy Van Ness points out when she meets me for a tour. Guests typically stay for seven days (a “classic women’s week” costs $12,950) and, according to Van Ness, 60 percent of visitors return every year.
“Increasingly, social status is this thing of being able to disconnect from the digital world.”
In the 13 years that Van Ness has led Golden Door, she’s noticed that the younger clientele, rather than obsessing over fitness fads, arrive anxious and desperate to take charge of their relationships with smartphones. This is easier said than done, even at one of the most intentionally relaxing places on Earth. When Van Ness first arrived at the retreat center in 2013, she’d inherited a place with no wifi. “The stress of not having [wifi] was more fearful than actually telling them to put [their phones] away,” Van Ness says, “because they felt that they couldn’t do it.” (Fans of The White Lotus might find this storyline familiar.)
So she installed wifi, and in 2017, she started experimenting with something less rigid. Minimal phone use is permitted in common areas, but attendees may use them inside their rooms, which are outfitted with a small black “sleep” bag for guests to tuck their digital devices away. Each is emblazoned with words of encouragement, such as “choose to look more at your inner wisdom than the screen.”
“When you tell people who are successful that they can’t do something, you’re taking something away from them,” Van Ness explains. “If you give them the choice to understand why they should not do that, they are gleeful to put it away.” Her sleep bag strategy aligns with 2017 research suggesting that a smartphone within one’s sight can diminish cognitive capacity. But I suspect that Golden Door’s digital detox has become popular with the well-heeled for a different reason. They get to indulge in the ultimate quiet luxury: being unreachable.
Although it’s now positioned as a form of wellness, digital detoxing entered the cultural lexicon at a time of panic. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how the company had harvested millions of Facebook users’ data and used it to influence the previous US presidential election. “All of a sudden, everyone started saying, ‘Oh, by the way, social media can manipulate you, and social media can be evil,’” says Anastasia Dedyukhina, the founder of the Consciously Digital Institute, an organization that is attempting to set standards for digital wellness practices.
In 2024, Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling The Anxious Generation , which hinged on an argument that digital devices were “rewiring” children’s brains, changed the tenor of cultural…
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