More than 200 people recently filled a church in central Amsterdam, but they weren’t there to attend a religious service. They flocked to the spacious 400-year-old Protestant church to seek a reprieve from the digital world.
Sitting on colorful pillows on the church’s stone floor, under golden chandeliers and a vaulted ceiling, the participants read and sketched. Some gathered in small groups to color on large swaths of paper while chatting. Others simply walked around.
The video of this “digital detox hangout,” as organizers called it, went viral — perhaps a sign of how unusual the mere act of coming together to hang out has become. The scene almost resembled a co-working space, except without laptops and phones. It was a space for co-existing, you could say.
This device-free hangout was hosted by the Offline Club, a Dutch group that’s been hosting internet-free events in various cities in the Netherlands to help people “swap screen time for real time,” according to the club’s press materials. The group, which launched in February, first started hosting “reading weekends” with no internet, but the founders wanted to bring the digital-free experiences into the city to help people incorporate these events into their daily lives, according to The Guardian.
A device-free experience within a group is part of a trend that is also catching on in the U.S., as people look for ways to combat the pervasive influence of screens and devices.
The numbers that show how much time we spend online are disheartening. According to recent studies, Americans spend about 7 hours online every day, which amounts to about 17 years of their life, according to Fortune. In 2024, the average time spent on social media every day worldwide was about 143 minutes per day (a decrease from 151 minutes in the previous year), according to Statista.
While there is no shortage of off-the-grid exotic retreats (just type “digital detox retreat” into Google), more device-free experiences and venues are popping up in an attempt to foster connectedness that has been ebbing away with the proliferation of screens.
Device-free experiences
On a recent Saturday morning, Faro, a coffee shop in the heart of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hummed with chatter. No laptops were in sight. Faro is the kind of intentional digital-free space that’s about a social experience as much as it is about coffee and pastries. The coffee shop is described as “post-productive” and “slightly romantic” on its website and hosts pop-up exhibitions and repair workshops. “We see and feel a loss of cherished local places and a strong need to reconnect, both with one another, with the places we inhabit, with the planet,” the business says.
Some restaurants around the country have been adopting a no-cellphone policy, too. For instance, diners at Caterina’s restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas, receive individual pouches to place their phones in for the duration of the meal. A restaurant in Verona, Italy, offers customers a free bottle of wine if they hand in their phone while they eat. Zuzu’s Petals in the Boston area calls itself a “screen-free wine and dessert bar,” and is operated by a couple who doesn’t own cellphones.
When Coffee Garden, a coffee shop in Salt Lake City, got rid of its internet during the pandemic when business was slow, owner Alan Hebertson liked the change; he told me that people talked more and stared at their screens less. Plus, Hebertson could accommodate more customers who came for fresh pastries and coffee. When, after the lockdowns, people began frequenting the shop again, he put up a sign: “Pretend it’s 1995. Talk to each other.”
Many customers came to appreciate the internet-free setting, Hebertson said, although some were unhappy about the change (even though devices are still allowed). “Many of our customers come not because of the Wi-Fi; they’re in there because it’s a social gathering spot and a long-term member of the community,” Hebertson said.
Some people have taken it upon themselves to create hangouts that aim to restore creativity and connection between people. Liz Lambson, an artist and Salt Lake City resident, hosts “art jams” inside her home, where guests are invited to bring a creative project and work on it alongside other guests. “It’s a place for a community of creative people to come and create anything, even if it’s chopping vegetables or practicing their instrument,” she said. She doesn’t ban phones, but organically, nobody ends up using them. “You literally can’t make art with your hands, if you’re holding a phone,” she told me. One guest recently brought clothes to mend. Others have brought puzzles, or worked on sewing and collaging, Lambson said. Some just hang out and talk. “It’s about inspiring each other to be productive in meaningful ways.”
A growing movement
Device-free spaces can serve as an important first step, a chance for people “to open their eyes,” said Jack Winston, the 28-year-old co-founder of an app called BePresent that tries to help people foster a healthier relationship with devices. “These places show awareness and how big this broader movement is around intentionality with our devices,” he told me.
While digital detoxing is a great exercise in developing a healthier relationship with devices, the reality is that tech is not going away, Winston said. With his app, he tries to sustain a more mindful use of the phone by blocking apps, reports on screen times, and different rewards and incentives to reduce mindless scrolling.
Winston had his own reckoning with screens when he recently lost his phone for a weekend. “It was the most transformational experience of my life,” Winston told me. “My anxiety melted away, my social connections deepened. I had the mental clarity to focus on what I wanted to focus on, whatever I wanted to, instead of this black box in my hand.”
With all the new efforts to moderate device use, we’re on the cusp of a new movement, he told me. “We’re at the beginning of creating an entire new category of health and wellness — digital wellness — that’ll be up there with fitness, sleep and nutrition,” he said.
A lab at Boston’s Children’s Hospital is already working on that. The Digital Wellness Lab at Boston’s Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School studies how to foster healthy digital media experiences for youth. The program has developed a digital wellness guide to help shape kids’ digital habits from birth to young adulthood. The lab’s director, Michael Rich, a Harvard Medical School professor and pediatrician, is known as a “mediatrician” — a pediatrician who understands media. He also leads a clinic that studies “interactive media and internet disorders.”
“What we seem to have done as a society — because we have these amazingly powerful tools for connecting with each other and with the larger world — we have traded away our deep and meaningful and sustaining connectedness with others for this near-infinite connectivity,” Rich said on a recent podcast, “which is by its very nature more attenuated, much weaker than our connection with people in real life, which is more difficult, more unpredictable and often, particularly for adolescents and kids, more awkward, yet it leads to greater intimacy.”
‘Technology manifesto’
For young people, the decrease in social skills facilitated by too much screen time is typically accompanied by increased anxiety. “They’re losing opportunities to have experiences that would lead to normal social development,” Shayne Webber, a therapist in San Antonio, Texas, who works with teens and families, told me.
Webber said some of his clients in their 20s are afraid to go to the grocery store. “There are people there, and they may have to interact with them,” he said. The digital-free events and spaces, like the church in Amsterdam, “allow people to have to be forced to look at people and learn to interact.”
A digital detox was imposed on one of Webber’s teenage clients when she was grounded from her phone for two weeks. Her anxiety decreased during this time, she told Webber, but she knew she’d want her phone back. So she asked if they could create rules around her phone use. Webber recommends families create a “technology manifesto,” a mutually agreed-upon set of rules. “It needs to be an open conversation in families about how we’re using tech,” he said. Parents can mess up in either direction by being over-controlling or allowing kids free rein.
Digital detox experiences may be a great way to foster social connection, but the most effective ways to intervene with youth, Webber told me, is to teach parents how to navigate the balance between freedom and constraints when it comes to screens. “We’re not going to get rid of the tech,” said Webber. “But we do need to learn to manage it so it doesn’t manage us.”