You’re Not Burned Out — You’re Digitally Poisoned
Digital Stockholm Syndrome: Why You’re Addicted to the Life You Hate
Our vacations are now just prettier places to be addicted.
Yesterday, I posted an episode with Uwern Jong, London-based Founder & Experientialist-in-Chief of OutThere travel magazine.
We got on the topic of phone-free travel as a trend.
Oh hello, phone-free, long time no see.
He confirmed my suspicions. Between 300 texts a day, 15 ads we didn’t ask to see, much less consummate, 1,000 emails, and incessant vermin-like notifications, the verdict is in:
We’re tired and we’re beginning to awaken to the fact that we’ve been sold a bill of goods. What makes this humanistic awakening so ironic is that we also happen to be addicted to the scam.
We hate this performative CyberPrison we’re in, but we also have Stockholm Syndrome. We will argue for our addiction and even debase others for deleting their social media, living off grid, or getting a dumb phone.
Well, my problem isn’t as bad as theirs, we console ourselves.
While we live alone-together in our little CyberSilos, the AI revolution is compounding exponentially, and while that reckoning may still be ten years away. Some are only now beginning to wake up from our prolonged trance since 1998 (computer) or 2007 (iphones) from blue light, ongoing WiFi radiation, and excessive brainwashing en masse - television conditioning wasn’t enough, apparently.
You might call this an Endocrine SuperStorm. You’ve heard that “sitting is the new cigarette,” no? The endless effects of our CyberPrison make sitting look like child’s play.
How many thoughts can you prove are your own each day?
Why do you find it harder to read a book cover-to-cover when you used to finish more books?
Do you ever wonder how many of your impulses are controlled by a television set, an accidental doomscroll, or another ad selling you something?
Something you would have never dreamed of wanting if it was still 1982. 1982 called. It wants your nervous system back.
Phone-free travel isn’t only about escaping the phone. It’s a gradual uprising and a cultural backlash begging for simplicity, disconnection, and peace.
According to Uwern Jong, here is what travel trends are reflecting: wellness, connection, community engagement, mindfulness, intergenerational, and phoneless travel.
Many people believe that our constant virtual reality is an inevitability, here to stay: the dating apps, endless social media traps, 5G, and the habit of living 2/3 of our waking life online, are all meant to continue well into 2100 and beyond.
I’m a bit more idealistic, however. While we’ve been dazzled by a technology era that Gates and Zucks still want to romanticize, and you don’t see a tech-free horizon yet, there is still nothing new under the sun. Meaning, humanity has been through revolutions and corrections before.
Like Pharaoh’s slaves, we are cozy, comfortable, wanting for nothing, but also trapped and disconnected from our own voice, direction, intuition and tribe. We have empathy for our dopamine captor, but since everyone on the planet does, we must educate ourselves on the merits of curing the world’s Stockholm Syndrome. I’ll save you those arguments now.
The good news is that every extreme cultural movement has an eventual backlash or correction. I submit that we’re right on the cusp of one. Am I a delusional Pollyanna?
Maybe. However, I can’t dispute the human herd patterns over the past 18 months which indicate sparks of sanity are dancing on the horizon.
This begs the question: Could we be headed back to our roots?
A Crash Course in Cultural Corrections
1. Prohibition → Rise of Organized Crime
Cause: The U.S. government bans alcohol in the 1920s, aiming to purify society.
Correction: Underground networks (like the Mafia) explode, bootlegging becomes lucrative, and crime becomes institutionalized and glorified — birthing a new American underworld.
1960s Counterculture → Reagan-Era Conservatism
Cause: The '60s saw massive anti-establishment rebellion: free love, psychedelics, anti-war protests.
Correction: By the 1980s, the pendulum swings hard toward traditionalism, law-and-order rhetoric, and capitalist patriotism under Reagan. Suburbs grow. Yuppies rise birthing many Alex P. Keaton’s.
Industrial Revolution → Romanticism
Cause: Mass mechanization, urban sprawl, and dehumanizing factory life in the 18th–19th centuries.
Correction: Artists and writers rebel with Romanticism — emphasizing nature, individual emotion, beauty, and the sublime. Nature is no longer just scenery; it becomes spiritual refuge.
The Enlightenment → Surrealism & Absurdist Art
Cause: The Enlightenment prioritized logic, rationality, and scientific objectivity.
Correction: Artists and thinkers in the early 20th century rebel with Surrealism and Absurdism — movements that celebrated the subconscious, dreams, chaos, and the irrational (especially post-WWI disillusionment).
Why should the Technology Age be any different? Here’s what I envision…
5. Tech Overload & Social Fragmentation → Neo-Analog Humanism
Cause: A decade+ of hyper-connectivity breeds disconnection:
Loneliness spikes despite 24/7 “connection”
Groupthink and algorithmic echo chambers replace nuanced thinking
Deep work & mastery is slowly replaced by dopamine-chasing multitasking
Cyberbullying, online shaming, and surveillance capitalism fracture trust
Families sit in the same room staring at different screens like the Kardashian sisters
Correction: This zeitgeist is not sustainable, I’d argue. The natural cultural correction is a movement that emerges rooted in Neo-Analog Humanism — a conscious return to tactile, embodied, human-scale experiences:
Eye contact becomes currency
Real rather than virtual communions
In-person gatherings, salons, and unplugged retreats surge in value
Zines, hand-written letters, and social dining making a comeback (already starting)
People seeking long-form thought, slowness, and contemplation over speed and virality
Reading more & scrolling less
Increased spiritual seeking and religious attendance to offset man’s search for meaning
Rituals, sacred spaces, and analog hobbies are rediscovered as tools of nervous system repair
This isn’t about nostalgia, and it’s not even anti-tech. No one’s arguing we throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It’s cultural, biological, and social self-defense.
The pendulum is swinging from mass digital hypnosis to micro-scale intimacy, autonomy, and attention reclamation.
Call it the New Reformation - if you smell what I’m smelling and you’re an early adopter, I’d like to invite you to something unique!
If you’ve read this far and feel the tension and quiet misery of a hyperconnected life robbing you of sovereignty, clarity, and depth, then you already know you weren’t designed for a digital leash.
You were built to create, commune, and build.
And if you’re smelling smoke, that’s because something old is burning.
This new era will require new minds, new frameworks, and new alliances.
The Digital Defiance Collective isn’t soft or vague - it’s an unlearning as much as it is a creative reclamation.
It’s a 6-week strategic rebellion against outdated mental operating systems and a rapid incubation chamber for powerful ideas that need to be brought to life with boldness and precision.
Interested in joining The Digital Defiance Collective?
If you’re a visionary who is done waiting for the world to catch up,
» Apply Here, it begins in June «
Rebellion looks different now. It’s quiet. It’s analog. It’s disruptive.
A rousing, necessary battle cry wrapped in velvet and voltage.
You’ve captured something I’ve long felt but rarely seen articulated with such muscular clarity: people say we are distracted, I say we are colonised. Our cognition, once the final frontier of freedom, is now just another real estate venture for Silicon Valley. And no, this isn’t nostalgia for 1982 or Ludditism in designer drag. It’s spiritual triage. We are not overwhelmed because we’re weak, we’re overwhelmed because this system is engineered to hijack our attention, flatten our desires, and rewire our instincts to match the market’s algorithms.
The irony is exquisite: we crave presence but mainline absence. We scroll for connection but metabolise alienation. And when someone finally says, “I’m out”, the crowd panics like the spell’s been broken. The exodus from Egypt has begun, but Pharaoh’s palace has WiFi, mood lighting, and free next-day delivery…. so who’s really walking out?
It’s not only disconnection from tech, it’s also recovering sacred boredom. That wide, empty space where nothing happens… and therefore everything can. We’ve traded the ineffable mystery of real life for the slot-machine of simulated experience. No wonder we feel existential jet lag, we are always somewhere else.
So yes, rebellion is analog now. And intimacy is the new insurrection.
I smell the same smoke you do. Something sacred is smoldering beneath the ruins of infinite content. And perhaps the future isn’t a shiny upgrade, but a return, not to the past, but to presence.