How 'wellness' overtook us, and why that's bad

The endless drive towards 'wellbeing' is just another form of marketing

Photo by Mor Shani on Unsplash

How long will you live, do you think? When I consider old age and whether I’ll be lucky enough make it, I hope to reach my late eighties, like my grandmother (who died in her sleep after a stroke, not like her screaming passengers). But I don’t want to be staggering on to a hundred, giving interviews to the local AI press about a tot of whisky a day and never going to bed on a quarrel. (It’s fine, you can go to bed on a quarrel - nobody ever died from ‘maintaining a quarrel overnight’, apart from perhaps a couple of women in forgotten Victorian novels). I don’t want to be described as ‘marvellous’ by weary care-home staff, or ‘an endless drain on our resources, in nappies’, as is more likely. All my friends will be dead, I’ll be worried about my eighty year old son, and I won’t be able to open a pack of biscuits or understand the instructions to switch anything on. I’ll go quietly, officer, long before the local school-kids are forced to come and sing Happy Birthday while a cheery snapper attempts to make me look half-alive, holding my burning conflagration of a cake.

Keep your 100 birthday candles, thanks.

Endless column inches, websites, ads, Insta and TikTok accounts are dedicated to ‘wellness.’ Billions of dollars are made from products that promise to ‘boost’ yours. (Wellness people love the word ‘boost’). The experts want you to give up ‘ultra-processed food’, and cook everything from scratch, but what you cook must be meat-free, unless it’s bone broth, which apparently ‘boosts’ your immune system. The rest of the time, you must be vegan, but also eat organically raised meat, and you must join a gym to work out in bursts of HIIT, but also revel in ‘forest bathing’ which ‘lowers stress and boosts the immune system,’ and you must take a rattle-bag of supplements daily, but also get your vitamins from vegetables, pulses and oily fish, because they’re better absorbed that way. You must bathe in sunshine for ‘essential vitamin D’, whilst not going out in the sun, because that’s the chief cause of skin cancer and will also cause ‘fine wrinkles around the eyes.’ Don’t use cosmetics that contain additives and parabens, you must use natural ingredients, but don’t forget that pharmaceutical skincare has been developed in a Swiss laboratory to reverse the visible signs of ageing. Go running but also power-walking is better for your joints, though aerobic exercise is vital. Sleep is essential, so your must get eight hours a night, though waking up at five am is the only way to get things done in a calm, productive space. Don’t forget sex is anti-ageing so don’t let it slip to the bottom of your to-do list, light a scented candle, make it special and spice it up.