While a peaceful session of yoga and meditation may help relieve stress and tension, some South Africans have taken a more active route — blowing off steam by smashing up discarded electronic devices with sledgehammers and baseball bats.
And entrepreneur Marco Caromba is making money out of it.
With frustration levels pushed to the limit by the Covid-19 lockdown, a tanking economy, growing unemployment and personal battles, wreaking havoc on appliances is lifting the mood for many, from high-flying business executives to emotionally exhausted parents.
Caromba stumbled on the idea overseas of beating the blues with his RageRoomSA concept — the first venue opened in Johannesburg in October, and more are planned in Durban and Cape Town.
Women make up the bulk of his clients, he said.
Among them is Margaret Arnold, 43, a Johannesburg financial services executive, who said she initially went to the rage room in solidarity with a friend who was dealing with difficult personal issues.
“I have been going through similar personal stuff,” Arnold said.
“Our company also just launched a new business initiative, which has been super stressful. On top of that, Covid-19 kept children locked up for another three weeks when they should have gone back to school weeks ago.
“By the time I got to the rage room I was really ready to bust TVs. It was a totally different form of therapy.
“It takes a lot less mental effort than seeing a psychologist to deal with your issues, which can be mentally taxing.
“After 10 minutes I was totally exhausted. It felt like I had done an hour’s full body workout.”
Sandton lawyer Natalie Shephard said she decided to do a session to get rid of built-up stress, tension and anger.
“It was a great way to physically release anger in the body. Afterwards I felt amazing — felt a great sense of relief, huge amount of adrenaline and a lot of exhaustion,” Shephard said.
“During some of the time in the rage room I was thinking about certain incidents, people and events, and worked through it by smashing something, but other times there was no thought behind it. It was just releasing stress by smashing things. I would definitely do it again.”
Psychologist Ingrid Artis said South Africans were severely stressed, and the demolition derby had “definite pluses”.
“People are sick of the mundane. This is like a mini-adventure where people can do something outrageous and it’s OK.”
Caromba said men are often timid until they have taken quite a few swings, but women are not.
“The moment they get into the room they go for it. The women’s weapon of choice is the baseball bat. Men prefer sledgehammers.”
The Covid-19 lockdown saw demand for his service spike, with Caromba opening the Johannesburg facility three months earlier than planned.
“We will soon have discarded cars and taxis on which people can take out their frustrations,” he said.
One challenge for the business is sourcing appliances fast enough. Caromba says he sources stock from scrapyards and second-hand dealers.
He said the idea for the rage room came from the US and Japan, where they have become a booming business since Covid hit.
Caromba said his clients were all professionals and included accountants, investors, lawyers and those who had just lost their jobs.
“There are also parents frustrated by 12 weeks of school holidays and people who are divorcing. Most are quite young, usually in their 20s and 30s.
“We have about 20 regulars. One comes several times a week for an hour. He says he can wear a mask and act like he normally wouldn’t and just go mad.”
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The videos on the website piqued my interest: people grabbing a sledgehammer or baseball bat and, to very loud head-banging music, smashing various electronic appliances to smithereens.
What’s not to like about that? Curiosity, growing frustrations and a deep-seated desire to vent pushed me to try it.
With an evil-villain mask over my face and holding a 15kg sledgehammer, I entered a shipping container. My targets were laid out neatly in front of me, some on the floor, others on an old wooden cable drum.
A few dents in the walls and some in the roof of the container bore testimony to the anger this space had witnessed.
The only instruction issued by my guide was not to hit my sister, who had come to share the fun. What followed was 30 minutes of swinging, heaving and screaming, with the occasional memory of a face or event flashing through my mind. I smashed five TVs, an untold number of windscreens and a variety of other appliances.
My primary target — an old dilapidated laptop — taunted me, egging me on to hit it one more time because repeated hits from a baseball bat had left no dent. As the exhaustion grew I knew it was now or never. With three final strikes I pulverised the device. Never before had I unleashed such rage.
Sweating profusely, I hit and screamed my anger out, until I was totally exhausted and collapsed on the lawn outside. The sense of relief was immense. Life’s problems, and people who just know how to niggle their way under my skin, had vanished for 30 glorious minutes.
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