My thoughts on the McWellness industry

For a number of years now, since Covid first reared it’s head and we were all instructed to keep calm and remain in our homes, I’ve noticed a marked change in the “wellness” industry. You’ve probably noticed it too, and you may well feel the same sense of unease about it that I do.

During the pandemic, there was a significant boom in the wellness industry. In 2019, before the pandemic took hold, the value of the global wellness industry stood at just over $4.4 trillion dollars (according to the Global Wellness Institute). In 2022, as the pandemic began to fade from our collective consciousness, it stood at around $5.6 trillion. The GWI estimates that it will grow by 8.6% a year to reach $8.5 trillion by 2027.

It’s big business. Much bigger than I had realised before I started digging around in the data.

The more it’s grown, the more I’ve noticed it becoming commoditised. Our anxiety, insecurities, and unhappiness packaged up and laid at our feet, and we’re told that we are the ones responsible for making it better.

To an extent, I agree with this. We’re all responsible for ourselves and our own wellbeing. What I don’t agree with is the undercurrent of the marketing. What these ideas about wellness that we’re peddled do very well is obfuscate what I feel to be the real reason for the increasing decline in our general mental health - the systemic failings of a capitalist society on the individuals within it.

The one hand directs our attention to our own stress and suffering, whilst the other throws a blanket over the potential root causes and hopes that we don’t notice. Those root causes being:

• Increased isolation and loneliness,
• The growth of the cult of the individual,
• Ever increasing platforms of consumption (i.e. the dopaminergic wonder drugs of social and on demand media), and
• An absence of meaning

Once again, we’ve become the products of an industry that profits from our maladies. Countless self-declared “gurus” telling us that we’ll feel better if we just stretch a bit, chant some bullshit self affirmation mantra, and completely ignore the capitalist parasite that’s slowly eating away at our insides like a gold plated tape worm.

The workplace McWellness offerings are no better. There’s a distinct smell about them. A kind of spiritual rot. They seem angled towards the benefit of the organisation, rather than the social or spiritual growth of the employees. That’s not wellness. That’s palatable manipulation, packaged in bright foil wrapping paper with a shiny bow.

It’s Willy’s Chocolate Experience. Great expectations building up to an empty grey warehouse and sad faced wonky donks.

My concern is that we are bastardising valid spiritual and philosophical practises that have genuine merit and benefit, and stripping them down in order to “fix” depressed employees who were broken by the very system that seeks to cure them. Not because it cares about their wellbeing, but because too many days off sick affects the bottom line.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m letting old age and cynicism get the better of me. Or maybe I’m just trusting my gut, and my gut don’t like it.

Much love,
David