The luxury of being unreachable

What happens when the world goes quiet for a while and you can finally hear yourself again.

Sun on my skin, a light breeze, pine trees and the almost absurdly loud sound of crickets. That’s the setting as I write this.

I’m on the island of Hvar, stretched out on a sunbed with a cappuccino next to me and the sea in front of me. My phone, for once, is nowhere particularly interesting.

10 days ago, I decided to disappear from it for a while. No WhatsApp. No social media. No waking up and immediately reaching for a screen before I’ve even properly opened my eyes. For two weeks, I wanted to see what would happen if I simply… wasn’t available all the time. To be honest, I expected it to be way harder.

What do you mean, not checking your messages for two weeks? What do you mean, going on a beautiful Croatian holiday and not uploading a single story to prove you were there?
Turns out: very much possible. And, perhaps more surprisingly, I haven’t missed it for a second.
There was no dramatic withdrawal, no phantom urge to check Instagram every three minutes. The transition felt strangely natural, almost as if some part of me had been waiting for permission to switch off. So I did.

The luxury of being Unreachable
From fast-forward to nowhere to be

I gave myself a few days before I started writing again, too. I didn’t want to turn relaxation into another project. No pressure to journal something profound, produce an article or emerge from my digital detox as a completely transformed woman with ten life lessons and glowing skin. I just wanted to be. And then, eventually, the inspiration to write came back on their own.

Maybe that’s what happens when you finally create a little space around yourself.

The past few months have been lived almost entirely in fast-forward: Barcelona, Bahrain, Berlin, Melbourne, Shanghai, Suzuka, Miami, Montreal, Monaco, Austria, England, Belgium, Budapest. In between, a few days at home in Zurich, weekends around Lake Lucerne, Lake Como and Lugano. Seeing it written down like that makes me think: wow. There are times when you don’t realise how much you’re moving because moving has simply become your normal.

And I loved so much of it. I met wonderful people, sat around tables in cities I might otherwise never have seen, discovered amazing restaurants, watched sunsets and sunrises from different corners of the world and somehow learned to pack a suitcase with frightening efficiency and speed. I feel incredibly lucky that my life has given me that. But gratitude and exhaustion can exist at the same time. Eventually, my body started asking for something my calendar couldn’t give it: stillness. The Formula 1 summer shutdown arrived at exactly the right moment. And instead of filling the pause with another itinerary, I decided to go back to my roots.

Island life, apparently

It had been a while since I had properly spent time here. My career has kept me travelling almost constantly since 2021… and somehow the places closest to you can become the ones you keep saying you’ll return to “when things calm down.” Things rarely calm down by themselves.
So here I am.

My life at the moment is almost comically simple: bikini, coffee, sea, journaling. Repeat.

In the mornings, I go up to the rooftop – which sounds far more glamorous than it is. “Rooftop” is really a generous description of an unfinished roof with a beautiful view. I sit on the floor with my lemon water in my piyamas, look out towards the sea and write whatever comes into my head. No notifications waiting at the top of the screen. No scrolling through somebody else’s morning routine while I’m supposed to be living mine. Just quiet. And in that quiet, something interesting has started happening: my own voice has become louder. Not literally, of course. If anything, it’s softer. But it’s easier to distinguish what I actually want from what I’ve simply been exposed to often enough that I started believing I wanted it.

We spend so much time absorbing other people’s lives without really noticing it. Their restaurants, relationships, careers, apartments, bodies, holidays, routines, clothes, opinions, trends. Even when we think we’re just scrolling for five minutes, we’re constantly being shown versions of what a good life is supposed to look like. Remove that for a while and you’re left with a surprisingly simple question: What do I like when nobody is showing me what to like? I’ve been thinking about that a lot here.

Chanel and an unfinished rooftop

Now, this is not about me returning from Croatia and renouncing materialism. Absolutely not.

I love beautiful things. I love beautiful hotels and restaurants. I love fashion, dressing up, discovering new places and the little ceremony of getting ready for dinner. I will most definitely remain a Chanel & Celine girl until further notice. But I can love all of that and still feel deeply happy sitting barefoot on an unfinished Croatian rooftop drinking lemon water. Actually, I don’t think those things contradict each other.

If anything, I’ve become increasingly interested in all the different parts of ourselves we sometimes try to make fit into one neat identity.

I work in a world of speed, performance and constant movement, yet I crave slowness. I love fashion, my 10 CHF matcha latte and aesthetics, yet some of the moments that make me feel richest cost almost nothing. I can enjoy a beautiful designer bag and still care deeply about self-awareness, mindfulness and prayer. I can want more from my life while being profoundly grateful for the life I already have.

Maybe we don’t need to choose. There’s something freeing about allowing yourself to be made up of contradictions … or perhaps realising they were never contradictions in the first place.

Depth doesn’t require deprivation. Ambition doesn’t require permanent acceleration. And enjoying beautiful things doesn’t make a quiet life any less meaningful. Both can be true.

When I told friends I was going offline, everyone was surprisingly supportive. Most said some version of: I should probably do that too. It made me realise how collectively tired we might be of being reachable. There is more conversation now around slow living, mindfulness, nervous-system regulation and creating boundaries with technology. Maybe because we’ve reached a point where being permanently connected no longer feels particularly luxurious. Being unreachable does. There’s a peculiar freedom in knowing that nothing is required of you for a few hours. Nobody can pull you into a conversation you weren’t having. You don’t need to know what everyone else is doing. You don’t have to respond, react, like, watch or keep up. Life becomes wonderfully small again.

What am I having for breakfast? Should I swim now or later? Is that breeze strong enough that I need to move into the sun? Where are we having dinner tonight? Very serious island matters. And slowly, I can feel something returning that I hadn’t realised I was missing: presence.
Not the performative kind where you put your phone away for dinner and congratulate yourself. The kind where you genuinely forget to wonder where your phone is.

I notice the sea more. I read for longer. Conversations stretch without interruption. Mornings seem to have more hours in them. I’m not constantly mentally leaving the moment I’m in to see what’s happening somewhere else. Perhaps that’s the strangest thing about our phones: they give us access to everywhere, while quietly making it harder to be fully here.

Coming back to yourself

I don’t think everyone needs to disappear for two weeks. Real life exists. Jobs exist. Children exist. People need to reach us. But I do think there’s something valuable in occasionally removing as much outside noise as your life allows and noticing what remains. A weekend. A day. A few hours every Sunday. Whatever is realistic. Not because being offline is morally superior. And not because Instagram is destroying us all. I’ll go back online. I’ll post beautiful things again. I’ll answer my messages and, knowing myself, eventually have far too many tabs open.

But I hope I return a little differently. Because this pause has reminded me that rest isn’t simply the absence of work. Sometimes it’s the absence of input. It’s allowing your mind to wander without immediately filling the empty space. Letting yourself become bored enough to have an original thought. Giving your body time to come down from the pace you’ve been asking it to sustain. And remembering that your life is still happening when nobody else can see it. Maybe especially then.

For now, I’m going back to my very demanding Croatian schedule: coffee, sea, something good for lunch, perhaps another swim. My phone can wait. The crickets are loud enough anyway.