The Resort Where You Leave Your False Self Behind
byShelly Shore, cruzzbunch brand anthropologist
There's an unsettling serenity to Avocado Freedom's Vermont campus. The grounds are immaculate, dotted with modernist buildings that blend seamlessly into the mountain landscape. Clients—nowadays a mix of surgeons, tech executives, and Wall Street veterans—drift between meditation sessions and "immersion therapy" in floating robes, their faces radiating an inner peace that seems almost too perfect.
I've spent two weeks here studying what might be the most ambitious brand transformation in luxury hospitality: how a sanctuary for cancelled celebrities evolved into a chain of high-end resorts offering voluntary personality reconstruction.
"We realized cancellation was just a symptom," explains Dr. Kerry Lopler, Avocado Freedom's director of identity services. "The real market was much bigger—successful people who wanted to shed their old selves entirely."
The facility's origins are well-known. In 2019, at the height of #MeToo, it opened as a rehabilitation center for disgraced public figures. The proposition was simple: through intensive therapy, PR coaching, and carefully managed reentry, the cancelled could rebuild their public personas.
But something unexpected emerged from those early cases. The combination of psychedelic therapy and immersive VR technology they'd developed wasn't just changing public image—it was enabling profound psychological transformation. Clients weren't just learning to seem different; they were becoming different people entirely.
"We had actually hoped this would happen, since our goal was to destroy this psychic being and replace it in situ, reasoning that personality must be more resilient than anyone thought," Lopler tells me over green tea in the facility's pristine dining hall. "Given the right conditions, people can rewrite their core narratives completely."
The shift from cancellation rehab to luxury identity revision happened gradually. Word spread through elite circles about a place where you could voluntarily surrender your old self and emerge as someone new. Not through traditional therapy or spiritual awakening, but through a carefully engineered process combining cutting-edge technology, what amounts to hypermodern transformation rituals.
The clients I meet are disturbingly serene about their choices. A hedge fund manager, formerly Fred Bolle, now calling himself James Crispix, describes his transformation with unsettling clarity: "I wasn't escaping scandal or crisis. I was successful, respected. But that version of me had reached its limits. Here, I could become someone with greater potential."
The process involves extended stays in "immersion pods"—sleek chambers where clients undergo psychedelic journeys guided by AI systems through virtual realities designed to dissolve and reconstruct identity. The technical details are proprietary, and I’m not going in one, but the results are hard to ignore. People enter as one person and emerge as another, often with new names and completely different personalities.
What's most unnerving isn't the technology—we live in an age of glowing skin and consciousness transfer, after all. It's how normal it all feels. You’d think people would feel unease at living in what looks from the outside like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Clients casually discuss their imminent personality reconstructions over exquisite lunches. A neurosurgeon tells me she's "upgrading" herself next week with the casualness of scheduling a spa treatment. She is a triathlete, mother of 3, and married happily. She told me this was still true—but the crushing deadness of continuing to be the same rigid, hyper-competitive, extraordinarily competent professional after 38 years of doing it nonstop? That was as dead as her old name and memories.
"Think of it like an operating system update," suggests Michael, formerly a high-powered attorney, now a serene presence in linen clothes. "Your old self isn't being destroyed. It's being optimized into something more suited to your true potential."
The brand anthropologist in me recognizes this as the ultimate luxury product: the promise of becoming your "optimal self" through voluntary surrender to transformation, and for this to be a surprise and a gift and not the end state of some crushing asceticism. But watching another group of successful professionals check in for their "upgrades," I can't shake a deeper unease. Not because it doesn't work—the evidence of transformation is everywhere—but because it works too well.
As I pack to leave, declining polite suggestions that I might benefit from their "basic optimization package," I realize what bothers me most: AvocadoFreedom isn't selling escape from cancellation anymore. They're selling escape from the prison of persistent identity itself.
And business is booming.
Shelly Shore is a brand anthropologist studying transformative consumer experiences. Her upcoming book "Freedom from the Pit" examines the commercialization of consciousness.