everything we know about health and wellness is just marketing
I’ve been riding the waves of the fitness industry for 13 years.
And I do mean waves.
It started when I was the world’s loneliest freshman at Arizona State University and had nothing better to do than spend all of my time at the gym, to becoming a personal trainer at 21, to becoming a self-development writer, to now, as some combination of everything (minus the loneliness) plus a breathwork coach (you could argue it started even before all that at 12 when diet culture of the 90’s and early aughts had me in a choke hold).
In this time, I’ve seen enough trends rise and fall to make your head spin. Different schools of thought prevail, like spokes on a wheel, spinning faster and faster with internet-driven momentum.
Keto, paleo, cold plunge, sauna, red light, greens powder, probiotics, gummies that calm you down, chocolate that revs you up, a ring that tells you how you slept—everywhere you turn in the health and wellness space, there’s some cool, revelatory scientific breakthrough.
And just behind it, someone selling it to you.
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The health and wellness space is profitable, to say the least. And I can’t blame or fault anyone for trying to make a buck—people are willing spend inordinate amounts of money on their health, and capitalizing on that is just…. smart.
But there’s a fundamental flaw: we’re spending more money on health care than ever, and we’re also sicker than ever.
People spend, hundreds, thousands, even millions of dollars on gear, gadgets, and supplements—to minimal benefit.
So what’s the deal?
We’ve been conditioned to believe that health is something you buy.
Because here’s the rub that they don’t want you to know:
The longest levers that we can pull to access optimal health are free. And they know that. So clever teams of marketers take these things—many of which have been practiced for thousands of years and are now vindicated by modern science—and turn them into things.
Things that you need.
You want to heal, don’t you?!
Time in the sun becomes red right devices. Swimming or bathing in a cold creek becomes a $5,000 tub of cold water. Walking around barefoot becomes a PEMF mat.
We keep circling the drain, never able to quite figure out why we still feel like hot garbage.
Mostly, it’s an outright outsourcing of how we feel. We give up our agency to what we think is science. And to a certain extent, it is science. But mostly, it’s to a clever team of marketers who know how to use that science to manipulate your psychology into thinking that once you buy this latest and greatest breakthrough, you’ll finally be healthy and happy.
At its core is a fundamental truth: most of us are scared of how we feel. Taking a look under the hood—a good long look in the proverbial mirror—is uncomfortable. What if we don’t like what we see? What if it uproots everything we think we know? In our fast-paced society of 24/7 productivity, there’s no time for that. Humans will choose what’s comfortable over what’s truly good for us so long as it’s familiar.
Cut off from our intuition, it’s easier to buy the thing that the marketing team has told us is going to cure what ails us and never think about it again, as opposed to really sitting down and examining what about how we’re living is causing those ails in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, devices, wearables, and supplements absolutely have their place—they’re fun, and many of them have real, tangible benefits.
But…
when’s the last time you’ve been outside?
Like, really outside?
When was the last time you put your feet on grass?
When was the last time you got natural light in your eyes for more than a few fleeting moments?
When was the last time you jumped in a cold lake?
When was the last time you’ve taken a full, deep breath?
When was the last time you laughed with friends?
When was the last time you had a full exhale?
When was the last time you just sat in the presence of the magic of the universe—a quiet sunset, a sky full of stars, watching someone you love be in their genius— and allowed yourself to just be in it?
No agenda.
Nothing to get through and check off the list before moving on to the next thing.
Just being.
We don’t know ourselves, how to regulate ourselves, or how to trust ourselves. We’re never taught. There’s no time. In lieu, we must need a cleanse. We must need NAD+ therapy. We must need blue light blockers. More peptides. Hotter saunas. Colder cold plunges.
The things that make us truly healthy are innate in our own physiology. The tools are already on board.
If you don’t have the foundations down, nothing you can buy is really going to make any difference.
It’s just throwing Band-Aids on a hemorrhaging wound.
But the unfortunate reality is that no one can make money from that. Healed people aren’t profitable. So they keep rolling out products, even ones aimed at targeting “root causes”.
And ultimately, we lose our sovereignty. Inherent in the purchase of these products, we sell our agency.
Real health doesn’t have a label attached to it. If it does, it’s just marketing.