The actual meaning of wellness can be a tricky question. Traditionally, it has been about satisfaction, feeling good about yourself, pursuing hobbies and resting. However, that does not align with the so-called Wellness Culture. That, in our current social media obsessed world, is an unstoppable quest to a supposed “better health”.
Set as a natural healing over conventional medicine, this concept dictates an individual responsibility over happiness and health. In other words, it blames the individual over systematic issues and rarely acknowledges that it requires a lot of privileges to sustain a healthy routine. There are plenty of social, cultural and environmental health problems that get ignored while focusing on individual experiences. After all, who has time to exercise, do yoga, journaling, make their own meals, have outside time, see their friends… every single day?
This culture can also be tracked to have very close references to diet culture. There was a shift of vocabulary, of course, but the chase for the perfect size, obsession over exercise and glorification of certain foods in depreciation of others is a rebrand of old patterns. As you can see, unhappiness about ourselves has never been so lucrative.
When wellness is marketed as a product to be purchased, what does healing actually mean? The market of healing goes way more than pills to lose weight or supplements. All those apps, alternative methods of therapy, gemstones, moon juice, usually promoted by influencers, are also a part of it.
According to a piece by Melissa Broder, published in Harper’s Bazaar earlier this year, this industry earns 1.8 trillion dollars per year and is expected to grow to 5 to 10 percent, only in the United States. We were never so committed to purchasing for our mental and physical health. But, on the other hand, we were never so anxious and depressed.
When you take a closer look into it, especially on social media, a quick solution for this imbalance of body and mind health is due to the confusion about soundness and consumerism. Being “well” doesn’t mean feeling well at all times – there is a difference between happiness and contentment. Tesse Oliveira, a Brazilian psychologist at AACD (a non-profit organization focused on ensuring medical-therapeutic care), explains that difference and how that happens in the digital world.
“We all seek to satisfy our desires and the faster, the better!”, Tesse states as she begins. “The internet, with so much information at our disposal, tends to sell entertaining, instant and fleeting joy. The great illusion is to think that happiness and joy are the same thing… To discover what makes us happy, we need to know ourselves enough to understand our purpose in life. And this is a discovery of a lifetime, it requires effort, constancy and work, much more than what the internet can offer us.”
“The great illusion is to think that happiness and joy are the same thing…”
To sum up, these stigmas about health, happiness and the perfect body aren’t a new thing, but the internet has given space for it to gain a much larger proportion. We’re so overwhelmed and anxious by all the things we’re supposedly doing wrong, that we became easy targets to the impacts of Wellness Culture.
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The article above was edited by Clara Rocha.
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