5 min readNew DelhiMay 24, 2026 04:37 AM IST
As screen time climbs and digital anxiety becomes an increasingly familiar complaint among parents, young professionals, and even policymakers, a quiet but fast-growing market is emerging around the proposition of helping people put their smartphones down.
Its offerings range from refurbished iPods flying off second-hand shelves to Lego’s most complicated brick sets selling out among adults and curated wilderness retreats where checking WhatsApp is, by design, not an option. Together, they form an unlikely but booming market: a break from the dopamine-laced tyranny of smartphones.
Much of this feeds into a rising demand for keeping off devices and weaning away from social media platforms. Bangalore-based Transforming Travels, for instance, is among the travel firms specifically offering “unplugged vacations’ packages,” involving what the agency calls periods of abstinence from smartphones and social media platforms. The hard sell typically entails a sojourn in a remote location, high up in the hills or inside the confines of a reserve forest, to help reduce screen dependence and anxiety. These trips range from weekend getaways to week-long group retreats, including a number of women-only groups, Chandni Aggarwal, the founder of Transforming Travels, told The Indian Express.
“Digital detox retreats work best in natural and remote locations, which is why those are the only kinds of destinations we usually propose,” Aggarwal said. “At times we intentionally choose places with limited network reception.”
The approach, she explains, is more disciplined than it might sound. Participants frequently arrive hoping to negotiate partial access — the occasional email check, a quick scroll. That, she says, is precisely what the retreat is designed to resist. “Even briefly checking emails or messages can immediately pull your mind back into stress, work, or social pressures, interrupting the entire process of self-disconnection and reflection.” Nearly 90% of her clients end up choosing remote or natural destinations, she adds — not because they are pushed to, but because once the logic is explained, it makes sense.
Few symbols of the detox moment are quite as striking as the iPod’s unexpected revival. Apple retired the device in May 2022, having long since folded music listening into the iPhone. Yet demand for the original, single-purpose music player has quietly crept back, driven, analysts suggest, by precisely the thing that made the iPhone seem like an upgrade: its connectivity.
For a generation that grew up with smartphones, the appeal of a device that plays music and does nothing else is not retro nostalgia so much as deliberate restraint. Google Trends data from the US showed a notable surge in searches for both the iPod and the iPod Nano in 2025.
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Back Market reported refurbished iPod sales rising 16% annually over the past two years, with demand also climbing in markets beyond the US. Tony Fadell, the former Apple engineer and product creator has taken note. “I think there are smarter ways of making an AirPod that has an iPod in it,” he told tech industry veteran Eric Newcomer in an April podcast interview. “So I think they need to bring back the iPod.”
The same logic is driving the surprising adult appetite for Lego. A Lego insider acknowledged the company is expanding its India plans, with demand rising both from parents seeking screen-free play for children and from adults gravitating toward the brand’s most complex sets. The complicated F1-themed range, which spans from “21-piece mystery bags” to “1,642-piece advanced builds,” is seeing its strongest growth at the elaborate end. Lego declined to comment formally on the specifics.
This is not just a consumer trend, it is increasingly a regulatory concern. The Economic Survey 2025-26 called on the government to introduce age-based limits for social media use among children and restrict digital advertising targeted at them — a move that would directly affect Meta and Google in one of their largest user markets.
The Survey highlighted Australia’s landmark legislation, which last year became the first in the world to enforce a minimum age for social media use, requiring platforms including Instagram, YouTube and Snap to block accounts of users below 16. The Australian law has drawn pushback from tech companies but broad support from parents, and is widely expected to set a template for tighter regulation elsewhere.
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In India, at least two states Andhra Pradesh and Goa are understood to be considering similar restrictions for children. The country’s data protection framework already prohibits behavioural tracking and targeted advertising to minors and requires parental consent for services offered to those under 18, though it is yet to come into effect.
Research is building the case for urgency. A 2025 small-sample study in Tamil Nadu’s Chengalpattu district found rising social media addiction among college students, with measurable impacts on academic performance, mental health and personal relationships — 13% of participants said social media use had damaged their personal relationships.
This study, led by Gokul Gopakumar from the Chennai-based Sree Balaji Medical College & Hospital and Bharath Institute of Higher Education and Research, suggested “significant behavioural patterns, risk factors, and demographic characteristics” as responsible for excessive social media use.
