Dark Retreats Are The New Detox

In a hillside bunker in southern Oregan, a tech bro is probably checking in to live out his next few days in near-total darkness. His days will be shaped not by sun or the clock, but by the soft shuffle of bare feet on stone flows, and the silent passing of food through a wooden hatch. For days – sometimes weeks – he and others like him will sit in lightless solitude, eyes wide open yet seeing nothing. They’ve gone to disappear. To see what happens when nothing distracts them from themselves.

This isn’t some fringe punishment or cultish ritual. It’s a darkness retreat — the latest in a line of spiritual practices-turned-wellness products. A darkness retreat, in its purest form, is the apex of sensory deprivation: a silent room sealed from light, no clocks, no phones, no human interaction, just meals passed anonymously through a hatch. Time folds in on itself. The body’s rhythms unspool. Thoughts roar. Hallucinations bloom. You go inward — or, as proponents will claim, beyond.

For a growing tribe of founders, biohackers, high-performance athletes, and mystically-inclined millionaires, voluntarily stepping into complete, pitch-black isolation for days at a time is not punishment — it’s the new path to self-mastery.

Why?

Because we’re all running out of places to go. And darkness — once terrifying — has become the final frontier.

The Dark Side of Enlightenment

The premise behind darkness retreats is deceptively simple: strip away all visual stimuli, and you force the brain to recalibrate. Without the barrage of light, screens, or social interaction, you’re left with your raw, unmediated self. Proponents say this leads to a cascade of effects — emotional purging, clarity, even spontaneous visions. At some centres, it’s billed as “meditation on steroids.”

To be fair, the effects of darkness retreats are not universally overblown. There is growing psychological evidence suggesting that extended isolation can lead to unusual neural activity — sometimes beneficial, sometimes not. In controlled doses, sensory deprivation can facilitate deep introspection and even therapeutic breakthroughs.

But the practice isn’t new. Darkness has long played a role in spiritual traditions, particularly in Tibetan Buddhism’s Dzogchen lineage and the Bon religion, where advanced practitioners used extended darkness to induce visionary states. These weren’t just moments of calm, but full-blown visual experiences — lights, deities, even encounters with the so-called Rainbow Body, a metaphysical state where the practitioner’s body dissolves into light. In these traditions, darkness isn’t emptiness; it’s a womb for revelation.

Fast-forward a few centuries and now that sacred disorientation is being repackaged for the jet-set elite — with better plumbing.

Sky Cave Retreat, OregonSky Cave Retreat

Sky Cave in Oregon, for example, offers individual subterranean cabins carved into the hillside where participants pay thousands to go off-grid, sans light, for up to a week. Even the co-founder of Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson, went to this retreat (although he fled in 12 hours).

He’s not the only high-achiever seeking answers in the void. Actress Tiffany Haddish has done it and NBA star Rudy Gobert has also gone dark.

Retreat as Performance?

But is this spiritual search, or just another form of elite spectacle?

There’s something almost theatrical about the modern darkness retreat. The language is monastic, but the presentation is boutique. Guests check into minimalist cabins with flushing toilets and memory-foam mattresses. There’s artisanal vegan food, curated music for the exit phase, and in some cases, integration coaches. The act of going dark is often followed by a very public re-entry — a podcast episode, an essay, a social post. Like Burning Man without the dust, darkness has become the next frontier for spiritual flexing.

In that sense, darkness retreats are perfectly calibrated for our time. They promise transformation through discomfort, but with safety nets. You can leave anytime. You’ll be checked on daily. You won’t die. But you might hallucinate the divine. It’s controlled ego death — a curated breakdown with a support hotline.

For many of the participants, particularly in tech, the retreat represents a radical course correction from the life they’ve built. The same people engineering our most addictive technologies are now paying to escape them. The irony is almost poetic: invent dopamine loops, then flee them. Code the algorithm, then unsee it.

As one wellness consultant put it, “People want space to think. The world’s too loud. Too fast. They’re chasing silence like it’s a luxury product.” And in some ways, it is.

However, there is some truth in the irony though.

Modern life has become pathologically overlit. We’re saturated — with screens, noise, information, movement, even self-improvement. We wake up and scroll. We listen to podcasts while brushing our teeth. We use mindfulness apps that send push notifications. Silence is no longer the baseline; it’s a subscription.

In this context, darkness is not just the absence of light. It’s the absence of everything. It’s a radical act of subtraction. There’s no mirror, no curated identity, no witness. No timeline to maintain, no feedback loop to game. Just you. And what lives beneath all the noise.

So maybe, that is the whole point.

In the tech world especially, there’s a growing awareness — even dread — that all this building hasn’t made us freer. That in solving for comfort, we’ve lost meaning. That the same minds who engineered dopamine loops and hyper-personalisation are now choking on their own inventions.

Darkness, then, becomes a kind of penance. A sacrament. A reset. One that costs a few thousand dollars and includes vegan soup.

Darkness retreats currently sit in that curious wellness intersection where ancient mysticism meets elite escapism. On one hand, they offer profound psychological introspection. On the other, they function like expensive existential timeout rooms.

It’s not the darkness that’s new. It’s the packaging. The tech elite didn’t invent introspection—they’re just the ones building UX for it. And in doing so, they’ve turned a once-monastic practice into the next frontier of self-optimisation. So the question isn’t whether you should try it. The real question is: what are we so desperate to escape from, that total darkness now feels like a relief?