Why Your 'Online Spiritual Retreat' Is Just Digital Procrastination

[broke_summer]

Let’s cut the spiritual bypassing. You don’t need a Zoom call or a pre-recorded meditation track to find yourself. As a 26-year-old queer artist and musician living in Oslo, I’ve built my entire creative practice around ritual, and I’ve seen firsthand how these “online retreats” often just become expensive ways to avoid actual presence. You’re trading silence for notifications.

Psychologically, real transformation requires exposure to discomfort, not a curated digital buffer. When you click through a pre-packaged online experience, you’re engaging in what attention economics calls “dopamine looping.” You want growth, but you’re actually just feeding the same distraction cycle. Look at The Hermit in the tarot. The card doesn’t show a guy with a laptop. It shows solitary, unmediated reflection. The Hermit carries a lantern because the light has to be internal. An online retreat outsources that light to a screen.

I work with ritual because it forces you to slow down and physically engage your environment—lighting a candle, striking a tuning fork, moving your body through space. That’s how you build the kind of focused attention that actually rewires the brain. Online retreats skip the physical anchor. They’re convenient, sure, but convenience is the enemy of depth.

If you’re serious about growth, log off. Step outside into the Oslo winter. Sit with the silence until it stops being uncomfortable. The Moon card warns us about illusion and misdirection. A screen is just another layer of static between you and the hard work of actually facing yourself. Close the laptop. Light a real candle. Do the work offline.