According to Arcep, in 2022, each French person would have spent 32 hours a week on average in front of a screen, i.e. “one fifth of the total time available to a person”. In this context, it is not surprising that more and more people want to completely disconnect… and that others want to help them in this direction, in hard cash.
According to the daily Les Echos, “30% of employees would be affected by a hyperconnection”, and risk depression or burnout. The problem is that it is not enough to recognize the problem to remedy it. Technology addiction is a real problem. People who are afflicted by it must be accompanied.
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This has given ideas to some entrepreneurs and “digital well-being” is now a very buoyant market. Indeed, everyone is now concerned, from overconnected teenagers to overworked professionals, and digital detox courses and solutions are flourishing all over the web. This is probably partly why 82% of French people are in favor of banning smartphones at school.
Overconnected people have created a very lucrative market
To detox, some choose to use “dumbs phones”, those old refurbished phones, like the Nokia 3210, that make the very idea of a social media doomscrolling session impossible. That said, this measure is not really enough to keep real addicts away from the Web. They must therefore turn to more elaborate solutions.
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And in this area, you can find everything for everyone, disconnection weekend in a luxury hotel at €600 per night to mobile applications that make you pay piecemeal if you want to surf the web. Are all these solutions effective in the long term? The answer is no “. As stated by a naturopath who organizes disconnection stays, people quickly plunge back into their failings. But do wellness entrepreneurs really have an interest in eradicating smartphone addiction?