I wish this were Europe

my exhaustion with getting gaslit by Big Wellness

via pinterest

I walk to the gym every day.

Some call it commendable, I call it practical—it’s less than a 10-minute walk from my house, and depending on the flow of traffic, it can take that long to drive. Plus, something about driving to the gym when it’s well within walking distance feels wildly ironic. Frankly, I think anyone who claps for me because I walk to the gym is an oaf.

Although, the route is not particularly attractive. Most of it traverses a four-lane road—one of the main east-west veins through my town, that I also have to cross.

Every day, I arrive at the crosswalk and hit the button. The mechanical voice from the box passive-aggressively beckons me to “wait”. As I stand on the yellow tactile tile, obeying the command of the mysterious voice, I think, This is where I’m going to die.

Ok, maybe not die, but at least get seriously hurt.

As the signal changes from the red hand to the white pixelated pedestrian, I know to check over my left shoulder—people turning right are too preoccupied with their necks craned to the left, glancing at the state of oncoming traffic, to notice that their right turn arrow might be red for a reason.

I almost get hit once a week.

Today, I almost got hit three times in a row by three consecutive cars.

I aggressively throw my hands up, the universal signature for "What the fuck is wrong with you?" I glare at the driver to ensure they see the error of their ways and feel my distaste.

I wish this were Europe, I think.

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Being in the wellness industry in the United States is… interesting—we focus so much on “things”. Adding things, taking things away, aestheticizing it all along the way. We’re tracking metrics, gamifying fitness, wearing LED red light masks, downloading meditation apps, buying supplements and matching Alo sets. We’re ditching ultra-processed food, avoiding seed oils, trading our normal light bulbs for ones with an orange tint (and incandescent, if you’re really on it), and removing products with toxic chemicals from our homes.

But the question remains: if we’re doing so much, then why isn’t anything happening (aside from propping up a $6 trillion industry—go us!)? The U.S. ranks last among 11 high-income countries in healthcare performance, despite spending $13,432 per person on healthcare, over $3,700 more than any other high-income nation. U.S. spending on wellness alone makes up 32% of the total global wellness market.

And the more we spend, the worse things seem to get. The further down the road we get, frantically applying every intervention we can think of, the more disconnected we become from what it actually means to be well. Because we don’t know what that looks like, let alone how it feels. And that makes us excellent customers.

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If we’re going to be skeptical of Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Tech (and the whole Big family), then we need to be skeptical of Big Wellness. When wellness falls prey to capitalism of the late-stage variety, it gets caught in a cycle of “more is better”—you can literally never be doing (or buying) enough. When in fact, for the most part, we need to do (and buy) less. Because the more we do, and the more we buy, the more we start to believe that health is external—something that must be bought, and the more you spend, the healthier you will be. But health is our inherent state when we strip away the bullshit (spoiler: most of it is bullshit). The stress of keeping up and falling behind has us running a race that we can never win—by design.

In our pursuit of more, we’ve engineered all of the actual wellness—the walkable cities, third spaces, access to healthcare, access to nature, etc.—out of society… and now it’s being sold back to us.

They destroyed the soil and sold us greens powder. They contaminated our water and sold us reverse osmosis water filters. Instead of regulating food additives, they sold us probiotics. Instead of unburdening us from the stress of a corrupt and unhinged medical establishment, they sold us meditation apps

They kept us inside at desks under fluorescent lighting and sold us walking pads and red light devices. They took away our third spaces, erected parking lots and drive-throughs, and then sold us adaptogen gummies. Instead of giving us the right to disconnect, they sold us productivity planners.

Things that should be our innate human rights have become symbols of status. Big Wellness gets us coming and going—profiting from both our dysregulation and our desperate attempts to “heal”, and we forget our nature in the process. We’ve relegated health to aesthetics and completely lost the plot.

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We don’t know what being rested actually feels like, so we need an app to tell us how we slept. We have no idea what level of activity feels right, so we have to track our steps, not really considering the 1,000-foot view of what it’s even for. We’re not really learning anything, we’re just putting more barriers between us and our intuition, outsourcing how we feel to tech and influencers—as long as it looks like we’re healthy, then who cares (and what that “looks like” is a moving target)?

All of the things are just band-aids to a systemic problem.

We’re playing wellness, instead of just being well—instead of demanding a societal framework that doesn’t make that feel impossible.

And that’s why I say I wish this were Europe—with their people-centric instead of car-centric cities (and even the ones that aren’t are still more so than here). With their reliable and safe public transportation, their third spaces, their pace of life that is neither frenzied nor flatlined, neither burnout-driven nor boredom-laced.

And look, I’m not trying to overromanticize Europe. Yes, I know “Europe” is incredibly diverse and lumping everything together is painting with a broad brush, and what I say isn’t true for everywhere in Europe, just as much as what I’m saying about the United States isn’t true for everywhere in the United States. But the places I have been in Europe all give me the same feeling: That the pace with which we live in the States, and the things that we place value on, make it nearly impossible to be well at its core. Even if you’re doing everything “right”, the stress of keeping up and slipping up cancels it all out.

Truthfully, I never saw myself as someone who pointed to “the system”. I used to cringe and roll my eyes at people who did. I have long believed in individual action. But the more I peel back the layers and look under the veil, the more I see that wellness culture has us eating our own tails. They’d rather sell us shiny quick fixes (and often position them as root-cause solutions) and profit off of us in every conceivable way instead of fixing the systemic design, cultural, and policy issues that are keeping us chronically unwell.

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I can’t claim to be an expert in economics—I took one microeconomics class in college, and you could make out very little from the professor’s broken English and thick French accent—but I do know a little bit about supply and demand. The law of supply and demand states that if people want a thing, and there’s not enough of it, pressure builds—and it must be released. In our case, since we’re talking about the way a society is structured, that pressure gets released not through producing more of a thing, but through policy, funding, and investment decisions.

I’m not trying to blame the consumer, but we really went along with it. Parks became parking lots, and we just shrugged. These things don’t exist because our culture doesn’t demand them—bike paths go unused, parks sit empty, we thumbed our noses at public transportation, and it remains unfunded and unsafe. We created demand for an individualistic culture, and that’s what we got.

BUT, I do still believe in individual action—that we can influence these things by changing our behavior: fill up the parks, create communities that require gathering places, congest the bike paths, vote with your dollar and support businesses and developers that prioritize community.

If we want things to change, we have to change our behavior. We have to repeatedly say no to fast, convenient, productive-at-all-costs hustle culture and the infrastructure it calls for, and yes to spending hours with friends in the park after work, or on the patio of our favorite establishment (that’s not next to a parking lot or busy highway).

What you allow is what will continue. I don’t want to be herded and hurried, I just want to be allowed to be a human being.

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