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Levi Felix used to live like a lot of us. Before founding adult summer camp Digital Detox (tagline: “disconnect to reconnect”), he spent 80 hours per week in physical contact with his MacBook, iPhone, and Blackberry as VP of a startup in LA called Causecast. He was happy, but unhealthy, and he thinks that lifestyle had something to do with the tear in his esophagus that put him in the hospital with internal bleeding.
He took that opportunity to look inside himself, and he quit.
The globetrotting, off-the-grid pilgrimage that followed culminated in Digital Detox, a device and wifi-free summer retreat which Levi founded with his girlfriend and brother. And after leading a few dozen sessions, coaching participants to separate from their devices and rediscover their place in the world, Felix realized the ideal scenario for unplugging was one he’d enjoyed with his brother since childhood.
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"In late 2012, I realized that playfulness and creativity and art and music is a great way to give people a chance to take a break and create mindfulness,” he said. “I realized this sounded a lot like summer camp, so my brother and I started Camp Grounded.”
According to Felix, summer camp for grown-ups yielded sparing search results in 2012. But the idea caught on quickly, and now it’s an industry with subcategories. Some camps are fancy (see also: “glamping”), some are loosely party themed, and some document their unplugged experience with Instagram photos of laptop DJs.
Camp Grounded, for its part, has now hosted 2,500 people from most states in the U.S. and beyond. The campers come from a range of industries, incomes, ages, and skill sets.
“But once you get here, all that stuff falls away,” Felix said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a musician or the CEO of a company when you’re doing archery.”
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Felix is quick to point out that he and his team, whose backgrounds range from yoga to hip-hop and improv, aren’t luddites. In fact, one of the most satisfying outcomes for Felix is what people in tech take back to work after they leave camp.
“Some people will go back and decide they want to work on design ethics at Facebook to get rid of endless feeds, or work at Google on the way clickthroughs work because it makes people spend too much time on a screen,” he said. “They think, ‘Maybe I don’t want people to play my game for 4 hours anymore, but make deeper connections with the other players.’”
Felix and his colleagues at Digital Detox hope you’ll apply the mindfulness you learn at Camp Grounded back home with you, whatever you do.
“We give every camper a journal for mindfulness 101,” Felix said. “Feel a phantom vibration? Mark it down. Want to Google something? Mark it down. Want to check your phone before bed? Mark it down. Then maybe when you go home, you might decide not to take your phone into the bedroom, where studies show you’re getting worse sleep because of that late night screen exposure, or maybe you won’t bring your phone to the dinner table because it interrupts your family’s conversation."
The camp runs October 9-12 in Marble Falls. Early bird registration closes this weekend.
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