Remedy for loneliness and burnout?

Adults across generations — from Gen X to Millennials to Gen Z — are embracing camp life as a remedy for two major ills of modern life: loneliness and burnout.

“Hundreds of millions of people every day feel a gap between their level of connection and where they want it to be, for a variety of reasons: social media and AI leading to feeling disconnected, not going into the office, living far away from their families, not having connected neighbourhoods,” said Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky, a keynote speaker and author who specialises in human connection and workplace culture.

Poswolsky’s career naturally grew out of his experience as an adult camp counselor at Camp Grounded from 2013 to 2017.

“I think the idea of adult camp might initially produce an eyeroll. ‘Why would an adult need camp? It’s childlike; we’re too old.’ But it’s the exact opposite,” said Poswolsky, who met his now-wife, Ali, at Camp Grounded.

“It’s the very thing many adults are missing the most — this chance to play and opportunity to connect with people that’s not related to networking, your career, your title.”

In 2023, Melanie Kelly, 44, felt burnt out from her work running marketing and communications for a solar company. A former painting major, she signed up for a weeklong art-making camp at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado in the US, to see if she could rediscover the “flow state” she remembered from painting that she rarely experienced at work.

Overnight, Kelly’s days went from being spent answering emails and staring at her computer screen to creating tangible art and sharing workshop space with like-minded campers.

“I was always trying to be more productive in a work sense or seeking professional development aligned with my work,” said Kelly. Art camp was the antidote to that tendency.

“It feels like there’s a bit of release in these types of moments or activities because you’re allowing yourself to rest,” she said. “Rest isn’t sleep. The opposite of work isn’t sleep; it’s play.”

Outside of workshop time, the art programme at Anderson Ranch also organised meals and activities for attendees to make socialising as frictionless as possible. While many of these camps are attended by couples, groups of girlfriends or, in Aronov’s company’s case, coworkers, they also cater to solo campers looking to meet new people.

At Michigan’s Camp Forever Fun, founder Joel Reisig actively encourages single attendees with the promise of a safe, fun and connected experience.

Reisig, a movie producer, had the idea to open an adult camp about a decade ago, after filming a movie about a group of girls attending horse camp. After shooting wrapped each day, the cast and crew relaxed by stargazing, petting horses and having dance parties.

“I thought to myself, adults need a summer camp break every bit as much as kids do,” Reisig said.

“It is very hard to make new friends after college. You are generally interacting with a few neighbours and a couple of people you work with. A weekend at Camp Forever Fun is a time to relax, climb the rock wall, sit in a kayak, ride a horse and actually have real conversations and possibly friendships with other stressed-out adults.”

At Camp Forever Fun, it’s 100 percent socially acceptable to introduce yourself to every single person at camp with zero fear of rejection. That’s not something most adults are able to find at a bar or coffee shop — and certainly not from the comfort of their couch, where people are increasingly spending their time. (According to a 2024 study, from 2003 to 2022, the average time Americans spend at home on a typical day has risen by one hour and 39 minutes.)

Alyx van der Vorm, 25, is a John Harvard Scholar who studied neuroscience and is the founder of social connection platform Clyx. She attributes rising rates of loneliness in part to how easy it’s become to get what we need without ever leaving home.

“So many things have been made frictionless, from laundry to ordering food, that when it actually comes to making plans, it seems like a bit of a mountain,” she says. “Add the fact that not everyone wants to be reaching out and initiating, and you suddenly have people spending a lot less time in person.”

That erosion of boundaries extends beyond social life: home, work and leisure are increasingly bleeding into one another. Since 2020, work increasingly follows people home, a recipe for burnout. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in March 2026, 22.6 percent of American workers teleworked, compared to just 17.9 percent in 2022. Telework was so rare before the coronavirus pandemic that the agency did not even measure rates prior to that.

“Many adults are now working in environments that constantly ask them to produce, multitask and stay connected,” said Matthew Leahy, a licensed clinical psychologist who has spent years designing and running camp programmes. “AI has only increased this. Even our downtime often becomes another form of consumption through our devices.”

Camp programmes and spending time in nature interrupt that cycle, Leahy said.

“Instead of focusing on productivity, at camp we encourage presence. People spend time outdoors, try new things, laugh, play and engage with others simply because it’s enjoyable.”

Adult camps “offer a container”, explained Sarah Boss, psychiatrist and clinical director of The Balance clinic, in Mallorca, Spain. “In that container, normal rules are suspended. Permission is given to be silly, to be bad at things and to talk to strangers. And that permission does a lot of the therapeutic work.”

Leahy believes that people aren’t necessarily looking to escape adulthood so much as environments where every hour feels like it has to be productive or plugged in.

“I don’t think adults are trying to relive childhood so much as recover some of the emotional experiences that childhood offered — wonder, awe, playfulness and genuine connection,” he said.

Loneliness and burnout aren’t just affecting people in the United States; the adult camp trend is growing globally as well.

Sarah El Nabulsi, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Dubai, is seeing this same burnout among her patients. Adult camps are also on the rise in the UAE, like the Bear Grylls Explorers Camp in Jebel Jais, Ras Al Khaimah, which opened in 2021 as a collection of nine recycled shipping container cabins and has since expanded to 16.

Meanwhile, the broader outdoor adventure market is also attracting visitors. Hatta Resorts and Wadi Hub, a glamping and outdoor-adventure destination in Dubai’s Hajar Mountains, welcomed more than 351,000 visitors between September 2023 and April 2024 — a 40.4 percent increase over the previous season, according to Dubail Holding.

“What I see in session, repeatedly, is that adults aren’t burned out from work alone; they’re burned out from the absence of unstructured, low-stakes social contact,” El Nabulsi said.

“Adult life strips out almost every context where people used to make friends without trying: no assigned seating, no shared schedule, no built-in repetition of seeing the same faces. Camp reintroduces exactly that structure, low-pressure, physical, screen-free and bounded in time.”