Go analogue with this brand new off-grid, tech-free cabin an hour from Dublin

Those of us of a certain vintage will remember the pre-smartphone world when dial-up internet was the only way we could play The Sims, when phones had aerials and you had to look people's numbers up in the Golden Pages. Back in those days, you could genuinely be bored, you'd watch dust float around the room, look out the window, and genuinely have the capacity to do nothing for hours at a time. That's not to say we didn't waste our time in other ways, like watching WWE, back-to-back tapes of our favourite films and waiting an unholy amount of time for the dial-up to load. It can be easy to look back on those times with a sense of nostalgia, before we were attached to our phones, hyper-contactable in every aspect of our existence. Jobs where you properly 'switch off' are now few and far between, it is now becoming the norm to respond to emails, check Slack and respond to customer feedback outside your contracted hours. In this hyperconnected world, there has never been a worse time for 'work-life balance', for a clear separation between work and home. Unfortunately, this is seen as a positive in some areas of the economy with productivity steadily growing in the EU over the past two decades, the average annual growth of GDP per hour worked between the years 2000 and 2022 was 1.2% according to Caixa Bank Research released last month.

One person who has felt the negative impacts of this hyper-connected world is Rosanna Irwin, whose experience working in the high-pressure "always-on" world of tech and climate tech industries, led her to found Samsú. The concept aims to counter this impact, by creating spaces in nature that allow guests to unplug from the demands of everyday life and find rest in nature. Located an hour from Dublin in a laurel forest, it's a luxury off-grid cabin inspired by Irwin's own transformative camping experience on the Danish island of Samsø.