ABOUT TIME YOU REST.

abouttime.rest is a 10-day, one-on-one (max three people) digital detox and soul confrontation in the Romanian mountains for high-functioning, high-achieving, quietly disillusioned people who make hard decisions for a living and are tired of burning out in style. Structured from wake-up to lights-out so you never have to decide what to do next.

In one sentence: ten days offline in the mountains, with one person who sees through your defences, to map what’s really running your life and change how you live when you go back.

Done watching your life through glass, half-present and half-scrolling?
Done wondering how much longer your soul can keep going on low battery while your calendar stays full?
This is ten days where your phone loses its crown, your role sits on the shelf, and someone steps into your universe with you and asks, without flinching: “If not this performance, then what are you really here to live?”

Digital detox, without the fairy dust

This is a boutique, fully structured 10-day program in the mountains of Romania. It’s designed for high-functioning, high-achieving, disillusioned elites whose brains have become Slack channels with legs: people everyone else leans on while they quietly fall apart.

Think: disillusioned effective altruists, second-career founders, PE/VC partners post-exit, media intellectuals at a crossroads, political advisers burned by power proximity, anyone who has tasted power but not wholeness.

You hand in your smartphone. You get a “dumb” phone for emergencies and logistics. There are no screens. No infinite scroll. No inbox. No Slack. No “just a quick check.”

What this is not

What this is

Who this is for (and who it isn’t)

You’ll probably feel seen if at least a few of these sound familiar:

You think in systems, see through façades, and can hold tension without needing to spiritualise it. You share our unease with the status quo and are not afraid of moral ambiguity; you’re just tired of navigating it alone.

You built this life for good reasons. We’re not here to mock that. We’re here to examine the cost.

It’s probably not for you if:

Why this is different from yoga, Vipassana & “kumbaya” circles

Most retreats ask you to step into a different universe: new language, new hierarchy, new rituals. You fly in, play a temporary character, feel something intense, then fly back into the exact same life.

We do the opposite. We, the facilitators, step into your universe.

In that sense, this is strategic shadow work for the class itself. We’re here to dislodge certainty, expose fragility, plant subversive seeds, and gently nudge the fracture lines that are already there.

Only then do we start gently messing with the script:

That’s what we call “non-therapy therapy”: no diagnosis, no couch, no pathologising. Just two or three humans, living your life with you for ten days, and asking the kind of questions most people in your world are too invested or too scared to ask.

The loop we’ll interrupt

You don’t burn out because you’re weak. You burn out because your mind is running an old survival script that once kept you safe and now quietly runs your calendar.

In Immunity to Change language, you have an improvement goal, behaviours that work against it, competing commitments, and big assumptions that keep everything frozen in place.

Over ten days we map that immunity explicitly, test the assumptions in real time, and design experiments and systems that make it harder for the old script to silently retake control once you go back.

What you leave with

We don’t promise a “new you.” You’re not a software release. What we aim for is something more boring and more powerful:

We translate this into a small set of “when X, then I Y” commitments that live in your actual life:

This is not a pep talk. It is a precise, occasionally brutal, always careful account of who you are, what grips you, and where your system is already cracking. You leave with language and structure, not hype.

One question we will not avoid is: “If nothing changes in the next 12 months, what breaks first: your body, your relationships, or your integrity?” Part of our work is to answer that honestly, then design your life so you don’t have to find out the hard way.

Ten days, zero decision fatigue

Burnout doesn’t come only from workload. It comes from a thousand tiny decisions and self-negotiations every day. Here, that stops. From the moment you arrive, the structure holds you.

What a day roughly looks like

The exact structure shifts over the 10 days, but one thing doesn’t: at every point, you know what you’re doing and why. You’re not asked to “figure it out as you go.”

Your smartphone stays off, sealed and physically away. Because physical distance = emotional distance. You carry a basic phone for emergency contact and essential logistics. No secret scrolling in the bathroom. No “just checking something.” The environment is designed so you don’t have to use willpower.

The facilitator: diagnostic soul confrontation, not “wellness”

At the core of this program is Ilinca. She is not your therapist, not your coach, not your consultant. What she offers is a psychologically intense, deeply intuitive, no-bullshit soul excavation for people who are used to being the sharpest person in the room.

We frame this as diagnostic soul confrontation. Not therapy. Not coaching. A precise, sometimes uncomfortable, always unhedged profile of your psyche that only she can mirror back.

“No retreat, ceremony, or drug has ever touched what this woman surfaced in me. I will never see myself the same way again.” — anonymous participant

To put it bluntly: you pay for the one person in the world who will see through your curated life in twenty minutes and actually say the thing no one else dares to say.

Why the Romanian mountains?

Because they’re stunning, quiet, slightly underestimated, and logistically simple from Western Europe. Direct flights into Bucharest from most major European cities, then a drive or train up into the hills.

Exact location details are shared once we’ve spoken and agreed we’re a good fit for each other.

Scarcity, selection & fit

This is not a mass-market wellness product. It is a personal reckoning. A mirror almost no one else will hold up to you. We treat it as a single, high-conviction trade in your own self-knowledge, not a subscription or an annuity stream.

Commitment is not a gimmick; it is skin in the game and narrative fuel. The right people are willing to stake time, comfort, and ego for the one thing that actually cuts through their own performance: a clear, unsanitised account of who they are, what holds them back, and where their fracture lines run.

Format & logistics

We finalise dates, contracts, and practicalities once we’ve had a proper conversation and both agree this is the right intervention at the right time.

How to explore if this is for you

No “Apply Now” funnel. No ticking boxes to impress an algorithm.

If something in you relaxed while reading this, and another part rolled its eyes but kept scrolling, that’s usually a good sign.

Step 1 ¡ Send an honest email

Write to ioan.ionita@abouttime.rest with:

Step 2 ¡ Short call

We schedule a 60-minute video call. Cameras on, bullshit off. We ask questions, you ask questions. If it still looks like a fit on both sides, we plan an in-person meeting in your city before making any final decision. If it’s a no on either side at any point, we say it plainly.

Step 3 · If it’s a yes

We fix dates, send you a detailed program outline, logistics, packing list, and a clear contract. You get one last week of “normal life + smartphone” before you come up into the mountains and switch it all off for a while.

No branding exercises. No higher purpose speeches. Just humans, time, and a structure strong enough to let you stop performing for a bit and listen to the parts of you that have been whispering for years.