The Wellness Trap

How our obsession with being healthy actually can make us unwell

Someone asked me last week in the comments, what can we do about all the problems of late-stage capitalism—a form of capitalism that is untethered to ethics or the social good—in the country in which we live if we can’t (or don’t want to) move to another country?

In addition to demanding more from our leaders, there are key aspects of our current situation that we have control over. One of them is informing ourselves about the parts of this system that are harmful to us and which we can reject, or if we aren’t at a place where we feel we can reject them, at least we can understand how they work and why they exist.

We have a lot of unlearning to do. Many things we accepted as true, simply are not.

I, for one, believed for a long time the wellness industry was a great thing. I shudder to think of how much money I spent in my quest to be healthy.

But it sounded so good—who doesn’t want wellness?

Originally, wellness was a good thing; it merely meant that we needed to think about our whole being and take care of ourselves rather than just reacting when we got sick. But in a hyper-capitalist system, the system first breaks your body and mind down and then it sells you an alleged fix to your misery. (The US wellness industry is valued at $450 billion annually; globally, it’s worth $5.6 trillion.)

It seems almost inevitable that wellness would turn into an industry and that it would also be used to enforce capitalist ideas about productivity and optimization. So, we moved fairly quickly from the idea of being well to the obsession with optimizing our bodies so that we could produce at lighting speed.