The wave of digital detox

Every few months, someone online announces they’re “taking a break from social media.” It is always phrased like a spiritual journey: a much-needed pilgrimage toward inner peace.

They promise they’ll “touch grass,” read more, maybe even rediscover who they are beyond the screen.

And yet, a week later, they’re back online posting about how liberating the break was — with a carousel of nature photos.

For what has become the new self-help fad, digital detoxes are well-intentioned yet short-lived and deeply performative. They do not cure digital dependence but dress it up in an admirable and self-affirming language.

Similar to following a juice cleanse for a week, it will likely soothe guilt without changing any lasting habits.

Detoxes come off as performances of restraint for an audience that never stops watching.

Announcing a break from social media has even become a form of content itself — a badge of self-awareness, a public declaration that you’re not like the average doomscrollers. But the act of announcing it already betrays the point. It is still chasing digital validation in a new, morally superior way.

The problem isn’t that people want to spend less time online. It’s that they treat the issue as an individual moral failing rather than a structural one.

Social media platforms are engineered to be addictive. Infinite scrolls, notifications and algorithmic rewards are designed to hijack attention the same way sugar triggers dopamine.

Going offline for a few days isn’t going to fix that. You’re blaming yourself for craving stimulation in a world made to keep you overstimulated.

Digital detox culture also runs on guilt. We treat screen time how we treat productivity: as a moral number that defines our worth.

When our phones tell us we’ve averaged six hours a day, we flinch with guilt, vowing to “do better.”

But guilt does not produce self-control; it produces overcorrection.

Just like the toxic diet industry, the digital detox industry has learned to monetize our guilt. There are now “detox retreats” where you can pay thousands to sit in a cabin without Wi-Fi.

There are minimalist phones marketed as tools for enlightenment, mindfulness apps with subscriptions to help you escape other subscriptions and influencers preaching disconnection from the very platforms on which they profit.

It’s capitalism’s most elegant move: selling the antidote to the disease it created.

But the truth is that our relationship with screens isn’t really about technology — it’s about escapism.

We scroll because we’re bored, anxious or lonely. We seek stimulation because stillness is unbearable.

But what seems unbeknownst to the public is that removing phones doesn’t actually remove the feeling.

Someone who deletes TikTok might binge Netflix instead. Someone who logs off Instagram might obsess over their text messages or email inbox.

The so-called disconnection marketed to us is disguised by substitution, we find other ways to continue this destructive cycle we claim to wish to leave.

Instead of forcing digital abstinence, people should be promoting digital awareness. Learning to use apps with intention is a better demonstration of self-control than deleting them all in a fit of frustration.

The ultimate irony of the digital detox is that it rarely ends in silence. Instead, it ends in a carefully composed post about how grounded you felt while offline.

The act of returning proves that the break was never truly about detachment. It was about rebranding your image and relationship to the same system that keeps you hooked.

Announcing you’re logging off might feel virtuous, but it doesn’t make you free. Freedom isn’t found in fleeing the digital world — it’s in learning to live inside it without being consumed.