The New Escape: Reality, Virtuality, and Religious Experience
Poligrafi December 18, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.35469/poligrafi.2025.512 via OpenAlex
Summary
Escapism has reversed: virtual spaces once offered refuge from reality, but now people seek escape from virtual life through digital detoxes, offline retreats, and slow living. These practices reflect an existential longing for silence, solitude, interiority, timelessness, and non-responsiveness—qualities that parallel religious experience. Although such retreats are often documented online, undermining their purpose, they reveal a widespread desire for depth and stillness. This secular escapism implicitly re-engages the sacred as a structure of experience rather than belief or doctrine.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Contemporary escapism from virtual life seeks experiential qualities like silence and solitude that mirror religious experience, revealing an implicit re-engagement with the sacred. |
Abstract
This article examines a cultural reversal in the logic of escapism: whereas virtuality once served as a refuge from the burdens of reality, it is now increasingly experienced as the domain from which individuals seek escape. Practices such as digital detoxes, offline retreats, and slow living signal more than technological fatigue—they reveal a deeper existential longing. Through a phenomenological lens, this article identifies the experiential qualities people seek in their retreat from virtual life: silence, solitude, interiority, timelessness, and non-responsiveness. These characteristics closely parallel the structure of religious experience across traditions. Rather than returning to a pre-digital world, today’s disconnection practices often reflect a search for a different mode of experience—one that resists algorithmic logic, commodification, and performative visibility. Paradoxically, even these retreats are often documented and shared online, reproducing the very conditions from which they aim to depart. Still, this movement suggests something significant: a largely unarticulated yet widespread desire for depth, stillness, and meaning. This article argues that contemporary escapism, though secular in form, reveals an implicit re-engagement with the sacred—less as belief or doctrine, and more as a structure of experience.