One in two professionals rates spiritual health as essential. Demand for silent retreats is surging. This is not a wellness trend. It is the market putting a price on the meaning that organisations have stopped producing.
A headline in the Business section stopped me: “Spiritual retreats for burnt-out executives.” The piece describes a silent exodus. Senior leaders booking out a meditation centre’s places within seconds, presidents reserving a weekend of silence at Torreciudad, professionals paying for twenty-four hours without phones or music to “return calm and make decisions from a place of serenity.” This is not an anecdote. It is a symptom with numbers behind it.
The Hard Data
A McKinsey Health Institute survey of more than 41,000 respondents across 26 countries found that between 41% and 85% rate spiritual health as essential — on a par with physical and mental health. The definition is deliberately broad: a sense of purpose, a connection to something larger than oneself.
In Spain, the largest retreat platform — deretiro.es, with 500,000 monthly visits — reported a 40% increase in participants over the past year. Its founder counts 1,500 retreats held in 2025 alone, with a waiting list. Corporate demand for silent retreats specifically has also risen by more than 20%.
The comfortable reading of all this is wellness. Mindfulness, self-care, digital detox: one more box on the corporate wellbeing programme. But it is worth looking the data in the face, because it says something far more uncomfortable.
The best professionals in this country are searching outside — and paying out of their own pocket — for what their work has stopped giving them inside. Silence to think. A place where they do not need to wear armour or prove anything. Meaning.
The Machine No One Is Naming
There is a mechanism here that deserves to be named.
The extractive company has outsourced the production of meaning. It optimises you Monday to Friday — every hour, every meeting, every objective — and delegates to your free time, and to your credit card, the task of putting you back together. The retreat is exactly that: you pay for the silence your working day denies you. And on Monday you return “calm”… to the same structure that emptied you on Friday. The serenity lasts as long as the journey home. It is a plaster on a wound that the weekend cannot heal, because the wound was not opened by stress: it was opened by the model.
Meaning cannot be subcontracted to a weekend in the mountains. Either a company generates it inside, or it condemns its people to buy it outside.
Two Forms of Capital
This is where I separate two ways of understanding capital, because it is the line that will divide the next decade.
There is capital that extracts: it takes from people, from territory, and from trust while they perform, and leaves off the balance sheet everything else — the wear, the emptiness, the emotional cost. And there is capital that grows roots: it builds purpose-driven companies where meaning is endogenous, embedded in what real problem they solve in the world, and in how they create and share value. The difference between the two is not a wellbeing programme or a sustainability report. It is whether the organisation produces meaning inside — or forces its people to buy it outside.
In the same piece, a fund partner articulates it with lucidity: we should review our personal strategy with the same rigour with which we review corporate strategy. I subscribe to every word, and allow myself to turn it around. Let us also review corporate strategy with the same demand for meaning with which we today review the personal. Because the underlying problem is not that executives meditate too little. It is that we have turned coherence into a private matter, a weekend matter, when it should be the operating system of the company. “Who am I? Am I coherent with the values I claim to defend?” cannot only be the question of the individual on a wooden bench in Huesca. It must also be the question the board asks itself.
What This Means for Anyone Who Leads or Invests
To those who chair a company, run it, or invest in it, let me translate this into your language.
The flight from meaning is not an HR topic: it is a balance-sheet line that nobody accounts for. It goes by the names of turnover among your best people, decisions made from fear, and talent that does not leave but quietly switches off. The soul of a company is not a wellness cost to cut in the next difficult quarter; it is infrastructure for sustained performance.
And I will venture a thesis for the years ahead: the due diligence of the future will not only measure how much EBITDA a business generates — it will measure how much meaning it generates. Because the common denominator of the profitability that endures — the kind that survives crises and fashions — is simple: people do not need to escape from the place where they work.
The retreats will stay full, and I am glad they exist. But they will stay full as long as companies stay empty. The real transformation does not happen on Sunday in the mountains, in silence, facing a valley. It happens on Monday, inside the business model, when someone with power decides that their company will stop being a place people need to flee in order to find themselves again.
That is the work. And it is a leadership task, not a mindfulness task.
Ángel Bonet is President and founder of ImpactCo, a global boutique consultancy specialised in the purpose economy and purpose-driven strategy. We help chairs, boards and investors build companies where meaning is not sought outside — it is generated within. The soul as a source of sustained, measurable and auditable profitability. Let’s talk: tribu@impactco.es.