Fake Caveman: The Rise of Analogue

The great offline revival is all film cameras, dumb phones and slightly smug linen. But the useful bit is not the aesthetic. It is remembering how to pay attention.

Peak screen time

A current trend gracing our grids — yes, the irony is already doing press-ups in the corner — is people trading bits of their tech for analogue versions.

Millennials and Gen Z, raised under the blue glow of laptops, iPhones, group chats, Slack channels, dating apps, Deliveroo tracking maps and the little dopamine casino we politely call “social media”, appear to be tired.

Not just “need a holiday” tired.

More like spiritually battered by rectangles tired.

So out come the analogue alarm clocks. The film cameras. The paperbacks. The notebooks. The dumb phones. The postcards. The wristwatches. The radical, borderline medieval act of standing in a kitchen and doing one thing at a time without listening to three podcasts, half-replying to a WhatsApp and checking whether someone from school has announced a half-marathon.

On the face of it, lovely. Calming. Novel. Almost suspiciously wholesome.

There is something undeniably satisfying about taking one photo on a film camera rather than firing 93 identical iPhone shots into the void. About waking to a small plastic clock instead of immediately waterboarding your nervous system with emails, headlines, reels, weather warnings and a man you barely remember from sixth form doing a marathon.

There is a case for going offline. A strong one.

Your attention is not a public footpath.

Fake caveman, or a decent idea?

But, obviously, because we are humans and post-social-media-big-bang humans at that, the analogue trend comes with a question.

How much of this is genuine refusal, and how much is aesthetic performance?

Is the film camera there to help you experience the moment differently, or to create better content about how deeply you experienced the moment? Is the handwritten letter an act of tenderness, or another prop in the museum of your personal brand? Are we going offline, or curating the appearance of being offline?

Fake caveman.

A little foraging basket. A little linen shirt. A little “I deleted Instagram for the weekend” Instagram post.

And look, we are not above it. None of us are. Somewhere, somehow, someone is currently photographing a book they have not read beside a coffee they do not intend to drink while pretending this counts as inner peace.

But maybe the answer is not to sneer at the whole thing. Maybe the answer is to test it properly.

Test it without the audience

Leave the phone at home for a walk. Buy the alarm clock and actually keep the phone out of the bedroom. Take the photo and do not upload it. Write the letter and accept that only one person will see it.

Going surfing and letting the session exist in your body, not on Strava, is a decent place to start.

Terrifying, we know.

If it is not on Instagram, did it even happen?

Yes.

That is sort of the point.

The research here is more complicated than a wellness trend would like. Digital-detox studies vary widely, and the best evidence does not hand out a universal prescription for bliss. Reducing the volume and reclaiming a bit of choice, though, is a different proposition from pretending technology is the devil. We like the tech. Of course we do.

The problem is not that the phone exists. It is that the phone keeps asking whether it may sit at the head of the table.

Get properly out of range

Cornwall is quite useful for this. The weather is changeable enough to make you look up, the sea is cold enough to make you pay attention and the coastline has a habit of reducing a full inbox to a small administrative nuisance.

In our world, a day of surfing in Cornwall does not need to be a performance of wildness. It can simply be a few hours in which the sea gets the final word. You paddle, you fall off, you paddle again. You learn what the tide is doing. You notice your breathing because it has become suddenly relevant.

For someone learning, that is the whole point. For an experienced surfer, it remains the whole point, which is irritatingly democratic of the ocean. Nobody gets to arrive, announce that they have completed surfing, and retain the certificate forever. Conditions move. Your body changes. The wave points out where the work is.

A yoga session, a sauna and a proper meal are not moral achievements either. They are just a civilised way to stop treating exhaustion as proof that your life is important.

The useful kind of primitive

We are not about to start navigating by moss, drying meat in the shed or sending retreat updates by carrier pigeon. The ape brain still wants what the ape brain wants: daylight, saltwater, fire, food, a few good people and a blessed moment where nobody is trying to monetise your attention.

For us, that is not a call to abandon the modern world. It is a reminder that it is allowed to be one of your tools, rather than the room you never leave.

So take the detox. Go full caveman for a week, a weekend or even for just an afternoon. Get the reset for yourself — not for the grid, not for the story, not for the soft-launch of your new, more mindful personality.

Then, when you are ready, plug back into the mainframe. If they ask, just tell them the cabin had no signal.

For a sharper look at the analogue revival — and a welcome reminder that going offline is fun, but living offline was not always the golden age nostalgia pretends it was — read Emma Beddington’s piece in The Guardian, “Going offline is fun. Living offline was not — just ask a child of the 90s.”

If that sounds like your kind of reset, take a look at what we get up to on a Peak surf retreat.

© 2026 Peak Boutique Surf Retreat. Words by Samuel Evans