One evening last summer, I found myself in a room at a Comfort Inn outside Seattle that smelled like it hadn’t been repainted since someone had smoked a thousand cigarettes in it 20 years ago, writing down all of the worst things that had ever happened to me. This was not a pleasant endeavour, nor was it one I had expected to have to undertake, although perhaps I should have done.
I ended up in this stale hotel room on the recommendation of a friend. She works in tech in Los Angeles and, when I was there on a reporting trip, I asked her what people in her milieu were excited about. She told me about a programme she was planning to sign up for called 40 Years of Zen.
An intriguing name and an intriguing concept, it turned out: a five-day neurohacking retreat in Washington state. It is the brainchild of Dave Asprey, 51, an ex-Silicon Valley techie known as one of the forefathers of biohacking. Asprey had made $6mn by the time he was 26, but was suffering from chronic fatigue until he discovered various meditative practices and a then-little-known process called “neurofeedback”, the combination of which, he claims, changed everything for him.