Artifacts

“We’re sedating women with consumerist self-care,” Raphael says. “You’re not stressed because you’re not doing enough yoga or taking enough bubble baths. There are other, bigger reasons why you feel stressed out. Maybe it’s because you don’t have maternity benefits. Maybe it’s because your boss is emailing you after 6pm. Maybe it’s because your partner doesn’t help you with the workload at home. These are the things that get shoved under the rug and instead you’re told that you yourself, alone, have to take care of the issues.”

Derkatch says that real wellness does not require an extensive menu of goods and services. It does not mean we swap out pharmaceuticals for natural products, or screen our tap water for hidden poisons, or sign up for resilience workshops. “Real wellness means having conditions under which we can flourish,” she says. It means social support, medical care that is accessible and empathetic, decent working conditions and ready sources of affordable and nutritious foods.

Raphael takes her reasoning a step further and argues that wellness has become a new form of faith. As organized religion has retreated from everyday life, she argues, wellness has rushed in to fill the void. “It’s providing belonging, identity, meaning, community. These are all the things that people used to find in their neighborhood church or synagogue. Wellness offers some sort of salvation on the horizon.” It also offers the illusion of control and empowerment. “If you work hard enough and you buy the right things, you’ll be saved from disease and ageing and anything bad happening to you,” Raphael says.

According to one well-trafficked statistic, the social determinants of health – factors like air quality, domestic safety, community support and education access – account for as much as 80% of health outcomes. But these realities are neatly erased from most wellness marketing.

“Everything about the language of wellness is designed to push the goal lines further and further out of reach,” she says. “You never arrive at a point to go like, ‘Oh, I’m well now.’ There’s always something else we could be doing.” As a result, there is no resting place because we can never fully restore what’s been lost, and there is always a greater state of enhancement to attain.

Wellness might be a landscape dotted with scammers, snake oil peddlers and influencers glowing from the force of their own sincerity, but what many of them are offering caters to needs that are both real and urgent. Americans, sick and stressed and isolated, are trying to navigate precariousness, the sense that at any moment their private lives and the global order might be snowed under.

Raphael writes that being healthy once meant dutiful visits to the doctor, but now entails a never-ending quest to overcome sickness, sadness, stress and even death. “Wellness,” she writes, “is almost an aspirational obsession for some and close to religious dogma for others.”