Is Wellness making us worse?
Wellness—the industry that grew out of self-help and fitness classes and has exploded into everything from yoga to crystals to juice cleanses—promises to make you better, stronger, healthier, and whole. It meets an ever-increasing demand among select Americans to “feel good” and find meaning in a cruel and confusing world. And it’s no wonder. In the face of rising health threats, extreme inequality, endless wars and our own possible extinction it makes sense that we would seek relief. But wellness isn’t just the yearning to be well. It is the commoditization of political ideas like “self care” and “empowerment” as something that you can buy. And it is a $4.5 trillion global industry that is servicing the millions of people like me who are desperate to be well.
But while wellness soars, so does inequality.
Inequality has been the purpose of the so-called “American Dream” for as long as we’ve had one. The institutions of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have resulted in a legacy of unequal conditions that runs as deep as roots. A recent study found the US to be both the wealthiest among developed nations—and the most unequal. While certain populations are making choices about organic and GMO-free food, the rest of the country is trying to figure out how to feed their families and pay their bills.
The truth is that we—the big WE, the American WE—are not well. Not by a long shot.
I call it “The Wellbeing Gap”: the unequal conditions that determine who gets to be well and who doesn’t. A system that leaves many people behind and ultimately hurts all of us. It destabilizes our economy, it causes stress that makes us sick, it fuels higher rates of crime and violence, it holds back our children, and it creates an ever deeper divide among neighbors and neighborhoods.
But that’s not the only cost. Everywhere we turn, culture gaslights us with the message that “we’re not good enough.” It tells us to “be authentic” as long as you are white, skinny, outgoing, driven, and positive. It says “buy this and you will be happy,” “do this and you will feel beautiful,” “eat this and you will be healthy,” “read this and you will be enlightened.” It is a storyline sponsored by a system that profits from our sickness.
The wellness industry sells us isolation and escapism. It dangles the false promise of perfection and purity. And we are just left more alone, more dissatisfied, and more isolated than ever. Fixating on self-help, self-seeking, self-everything keeps us fending for ourselves, neglecting the suffering of our friends and neighbors, and denying our humanity.
Wellness is not making us well. It’s making us worse. By all accounts, we are not ok, not better off, not thriving. While wellness promises enlightenment, the circumstances of our lived reality tell a different story. The many crises we are facing are exponential - from infectious disease, to racial injustice, to extreme income inequality, to climate change acceleration. And while wellness exploits our fear and vulnerabilities, it does nothing to address the systems that got us here in the first place. It blames us for our struggles but refuses to acknowledge what’s at the root of our suffering.
To make things worse, most of today's wellness industry draws on a lineage of mind-body practices, largely from South Asian and Indigenous cultures, that were often a part of spiritual traditions that employed a holistic and collectivist approach to wellbeing. Yet these practices have been divorced from their original contexts, distorted, and commodified to accommodate white capitalist culture.
In American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal, I do my best to uncover this truth, and how the wellness industry itself has become a weapon of dominant systems to maintain the status quo and distract people from reality. Despite our desperate pursuit, wellness is not making us well. Wellbeing which I define as the experience and state of being well and whole - isn’t a privilege, it’s a human right. That means that true wellness - which I understand to be the active pursuit of wellbeing - demands that we confront everything that is the way of our collective wellbeing.
No amount of green juice or hybrid cars are going to save the planet. Meditation is not going to undo systemic racism. Eco-tourism is not going to solve inequality. We need more than another trendy wellness regimen. But wellness sells us the idea that we can buy our way to wellbeing. I bought into that myth. I traded in my corporate ambition for wellness purity and realized that it was just more of the same. It is a constant cycle that keeps us stuck in the status quo and starving for more. And while it is easy to turn away and stay in our “gated communities of wellness,” we must turn towards the hard-to-look-at truth of our people and planet and demand more of ourselves and one another.