It is a difficult time to be well. The National Alliance on Mental Illness has it that one in five United States adults experiences mental illness. More than forty percent of American adults are obese. Contemporary life is overwhelmingly sedentary; the workday has expanded, creeping further into the personal lives of those lucky enough not to hold multiple jobs. As Sami Reiss writes in GQ, “our food system is broken and is making lots of people quite sick.” We are exposed to more stressors than the human brain was designed to process: global decline is transmogrified into the omnipresent scroll, social media transforms human interaction into cynical games, precarity abounds Mercifully, there is an app for all of this.
Whether despite or because of this state of the world, wellness, as the trend cycle would have it, is in vogue. Outside of the avant garde of cool-kiddery and wealth attempting, through hoarding Ozempic away from diabetes patients or the old-fashioned nicotine and cocaine diet, to bring back heroin chic, the cultural zeitgeist is all about health. Sobriety is in, as is therapy. Those Americans who have remained, against all odds, unaware of mental health had their ignorance shattered this week when the cast of Ted Lasso visited the White House.
It should come as no surprise, in a society that has sacrificed human and natural flourishing to the altar of efficiency with a religious fervor over the past 80 years, that people are beginning to feel a need to prioritize and center their physical and mental health. When the airplane masks come down, you put yours on first; couldn’t it be that the road to a healthier society starts at least spiritually with a healthy you? Nor, it should go without saying, is our preoccupation with wellness a counterproductive or bad thing. It is fundamentally crucial that people are in a position to thrive; in a society that erodes the necessary conditions, it is sensible and heroic (if not also tragic) to try and create them yourself.
Still, it is alarming, if not at all shocking, to see the way in which the wellness industry has been captured by, well, industry. Capital, unlike human beings, does not require a certain set of conditions to flourish. It exploits wherever, and whenever, it can. Where capital perceives a void, it expands parasitically. That the wellness crisis has been brought into being by a culture governed by capital is of no concern; business is most effective when it creates the need for more business. Wellness is in, which means there is money to be made on wellness.
The wellness economy, as with functionally any twenty-first century economy, is a technological one. The question of how to lead a healthy life in an unhealthy world has been answered by apps and devices. Want to introduce meditation into your life? Try Headspace. Talk it out? Every podcast listener knows about BetterHealth. Your Oura ring can help you sleep; your Apple Watch will remind you to stand up each hour; your Whoop will tell you when to take it easy, when to hit the gym, and how many calories you’ve burned in between. God save the aspirant bodybuilder who doesn’t at least try counting their macros on MyFitnessPal.
The panoply of wearables, trackers, and apps that contour the wellness economy’s terrain can be remarkably valuable to those pursuing their physical or mental fitness. There is real value in pursuing sleep with intentionality, knowing your basal metabolic rate, thoughtfully constructing your diet, knowing how, when, and why to exercise, and being reminded to take a breath. I have anecdotally used many and experienced genuine transformation and fulfillment. And yet there is an unnatural, corrosive flatness to wellness mediated through technology in just the same ways that a life mediated through technology is rendered a pale imitation. At their most neutral, these technologies threaten to transform personal wellbeing into just another gamified side task; more often, they are governed by opaque proprietary algorithms, smuggling dubious prescriptions into ostensibly neutral health advice in a sort of behavior-modifying taunt. I have paced back and forth in my apartment to convince my Apple Watch that I was active enough today; I have taken my Oura ring off to convince it that I was taking it easy, lest they dock my Readiness and Activity Scores.
All methodological quibbles with technological wellness come secondary to the question of their medium. It is difficult to balance the short-term feeling of accomplishment, validation, and progress delivered by wellness capitalists against the knowledge, fundamental to any serious pursuit of wellness, that something that further attaches us to our devices cannot, by design, be making us well. The wellness economy depends upon the foundational lie that the road to wellbeing is paved with more, or at least smarter, technological usage. It is with an ironic and vulgar flourish that so many of these applications, services, and corporations sell holistic plans based largely on ancestral, natural, or historic wellness insights predating them. Considered thusly, the wellness economy is the bitterest encapsulation of the 21st century techno-capitalist credo. We’ll teach you how people like you lived before you had computers in your pockets, they say, but you’re going to need to use a lot more of that computer to learn how to do it. Like all marketing, it is a deeply ideological ploy: the problem is not screens in your life or the system of logic they represent – it’s that you’re not using the screens correctly.
There are, of course, countless other problems with the way in which technological progress has been marketed as the next frontier of personal wellness. Chief among them is data privacy, a worrisome prospect given the fact that the Silicon Valley economy is one perpetuated almost entirely by the buying, selling, and harvesting of your data. Knowing how many steps you have taken in a day is a less appealing prospect when you realize Apple knows where each of those steps were taken; your heart rate, it stands to reason, is incredibly valuable to certain people.
Wellness culture receives undue and unmerited criticism for its perceived vanity, individualism, and consonance with capitalist or right-wing ideological structures. At its best, pursuing your physical and mental wellness is empowering, transformational, and life-affirming; in other words, it is essential to thriving, and something that every ideological system interesting in maximizing human thriving should prioritize. The wellness economy, while trading on these ideals and languages, offers something else entirely – that you may become well according to the machine’s logic. That you will both become and produce the perfect data. Wellness is a noble and humanistic aim, but it would be unwise to seek deliverance from those who have made us sick.