Clémence is categorical:
"At first, you feel naked"
, recalls the 29-year-old Parisian bookseller, who challenged herself to leave without her smartphone last summer, first hiking on the paths of Saint- Jacques-de-Compostelle, then visiting friends in the south of France.
By leaving without her "precious" for three weeks, she then said goodbye to messages from her loved ones, to her GPS, to the possibility of scrolling through her news feed when she was bored, to that of listening to music in transport… And even on your watch!
“Normally, I refer to my cell phone to get the time.
There, I had no time reference
, ”explains the young woman.
But after a few days, she takes the fold.
“Very quickly, I felt that it really did me good, that I was less distracted, more concentrated in my actions.
I felt like I had time to do more things.
I read a lot, I daydreamed, I wrote letters… I also liked the fact of not having the possibility of taking photos and that this trip belonged to me 100%”, she says
.
A feeling also shared by Paul, 26, who left for Helsinki in August 2018, simply with an
"old flip phone"
to get the time and call in case of emergency.
After a year of intense work, this regional daily press journalist wanted a disconnected parenthesis, to take the time to observe, to be bored, to stroll and, too, to take pictures with his eyes.
"Without a smartphone, when you sit on the terrace of a café, you force yourself to look around you if you don't have your eyes glued to your phone," he describes
.
He takes advantage of this trip to Finland far from the airwaves to carry out a work of introspection, and on his return, comes out.
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“We need to be a little more resourceful”
Traveling to the other side of the world without a phone can sometimes be more difficult to find your way.
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If the balance sheet is extremely positive on the whole for the two protagonists, Clémence also mentions certain galleys.
On several occasions, she found her beak in the water.
“When I arrived in the evening after my day's walk and wanted a room, I was constantly told that everything was already sold and that I should have booked”.
Which means having a GPS and knowing where you're going… Ditto on the transport side.
“At one point I wanted to change a train ticket.
As everything is digitized, I had to do it on the application.
So I borrowed a smartphone.
Problem: the app referred to a security code only accessible via my phone left at home…”.
Rachel, a 32-year-old editor, accustomed to traveling without a smartphone since she doesn't use one in her daily life either, confirms:
“You actually have to be a little
more resourceful”.
But according to her, this is what makes the salt of the experience.
On several occasions, the 30-year-old found herself in the middle of comical situations.
She remembers in particular a trip to China in 2016 in the province of Sichuan, where she exchanged with a restaurateur in a kind of sign language to hope to find her way.
“If I had a smartphone, I would have just mechanically tracked my GPS.
There, I discussed with someone and I still remember it eight years later!
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“The more we are connected, the more we need to disconnect”
And they are not the only ones now seeking disconnection on vacation.
“There is a real trend that has been emerging for several years”,
reports Jean-François Rial, CEO of Voyageurs du Monde, which today offers nearly 350 stays under the
“Digital Detox”
banner , against only a few proposals there. five years old.
Isabelle Fontaine, therapist author of
My digital detox notebook
(Ed. Solar), diagnoses:
“The more the years pass, the more we are connected and the more we need to disconnect”.
Vincent Dupin, creator of Into the Tribe, which offers digital detox seminars to companies, confirms this:
“With us, demand notably peaked after confinement, after telework exploded digital uses and screen time”.
All that remains is to try the experiment.
(*) According to an ELABE study published in 2019 conducted from June 18 to July 1, 2019, with a panel of 1204 people.
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