Modern wellness, at its core, is a self-sustaining doom loop of precautionary, aspirational consumption: Buy to be better to buy more to be better still. Which is why, despite Raphael’s arguments, I don’t fully buy that wellness has taken on the role of religion. Instead, in classically entrepreneurial American fashion, it’s become extra unpaid work—the very thing we don’t need more of and truly don’t have time for.

~ Sophie Gilbert from, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/10/goop-wellness-culture-self-care-parenting/671699/

I’d never really thought of it as “exhausting” until I read this article. Now I’m thinking that what I’ve been rebelling against, in the last year or three, is my self–imposed, continuous–improvement mindset of wellness. What I really want to do, is nothing; literally nothing in the sense of just lay in a hammock for—I dunno—a week, maybe much much longer. I’d thought, again in the last year or three, that I’d insulated myself from the outside effects Gilbert describes so clearly, but now I’m not so sure. I’m definitely way down the downward–slope side of spending money on “wellness.” But I’m definitely aware that I spend a lot of time thinking about, arranging, tweaking, planning, assessing… around wellness. Food for thought, indeed.

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