should I start smoking?

or, the commodification and enshittification of community

You know that phenomenon when we say a word so much it starts to sound weird and loses its meaning, as if it’s leaking through the cracks of reality?

It’s called semantic satiation.

The fact that I know what it’s called is a) something I like to whip out from time to time to sound smart, and b) really a testament to how often it happens to me.

I mean, when you think about it, it makes sense. We make sounds with our mouths and, inherently, these sounds don’t mean anything until we assign meaning to them. Make those sounds enough, and the neurons that associate that meaning start to fatigue, weakening the link between the sound of the word and the concept it represents until it disintegrates into unintelligible goo.

I usually recover quickly—just a temporary glitch in the matrix.

But some things are harder to recover from—the more collective, saturated varieties of semantic satiation. The words that have been used so many times they’ve turned weightless and brittle. Words like:

Trauma, literally, authenticity, fascist, community, burnout, holding space...

But today, our semantic satiation word of the day is self-care.

It’s hard to imagine now, but self-care used to actually mean something, before we started applying it to whatever was most convenient in the moment.

Cancelling plans? Self-care. Binge watching Love Island? Self-care. Spending $300 on a custom astrology reading? Self-care. How else were you supposed to know if your situationship was doomed by Saturn from the start?

But self-care was meant to be deeper. More radical.

Self-care first entered the lexicon in the 1950s within medical, psychiatric, and geriatric institutions as a way to empower patients to manage their own health and foster a sense of independence and self-worth in long-term care settings. Straightforward enough.

But it wasn’t until the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s that it became more widely used, when the Black Panther Party injected the idea into the broader culture as a means to fight back against racism. They realized that, in order to keep fighting against oppression, they needed to take care of themselves and their community so that they could maintain their energy and momentum.

As Audre Lorde would go on to say in her 1988 book A Burst of Light: And Other Essays

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

The state of self-care—and wellness in general—today feels like a far cry from “warfare”.

Quite the opposite. It feels more like compliance—a full-blown industrial complex that has us by the (wrinkleless) throats.

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Now, I’m not an expert in business and economics, but I do know that, in order to be successful, a business needs a product or service that delivers value to its customers. That solves a problem. And what they’re willing to pay for it must match the value it provides.

However, it turns out that actually solving problems is bad for business in the long run. What you have to do, and what the wellness industrial complex does so well, is create and perpetuate problems behind every corner. Underneath every stone that gets turned over is—congrats—more stones. Stones to snatch your face. Stones to put up your yoni. Stones to charge under a full moon and put in every corner of your house.

It’s stones all the way down.

And the more stones you flip, the more problems you didn’t even know existed you find.

The evil genius of this industry is that it creates and perpetuates feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, and scarcity so that they can sell you the escape. Get ‘em comin’ and goin’, as it were.

You’re never productive enough, optimized enough, regulated enough. Buy the right supplements, track the right metrics, delicately stack your 5 AM morning routine, so that one day, maybe, you can become the actualized version of yourself you’ve been manifesting.

Except that day never comes. It doesn’t matter what you do—that shiny version of you will always remain in the distance, like a desert marriage. Instead, these “solutions” become new obligations. Meditation is just another item on the checklist. Self-care—which began as an act of resistance—seems to have become a part of the very thing we meant to resist. Keeping us on a perpetual treadmill so we don’t have the energy to… shoot, forget resist, but to live in the first place*.*

Because people who live passionately, who live and relish in the moment, are hard to sell to. Hard to exploit. Hard to control.

At this point, I feel like I’ve been around long enough to see that everything the wellness industry touches turns to shit—a caricaturized, watered-down version of wellbeing and humanity. They took our burnout and sold us meditation apps. They took our time stuck indoors in front of computers and gave us a $600 red light shower head (yes, it exists, and I can’t lie, it’s kind of sick).

Instead of real solutions, we get consolation prizes.

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Which brings us to… our surprise, bonus semantic satiation word of the day!!

Community.

Big-self-care has gotten so big and hungry that it’s starting to consume (and ruin) everything else. Anything that even kind of looks like well-being is on the menu. It’s the reason things like community are becoming absolutely meaningless gibberish. When someone starts talking about “community”, it’s hard for me not to bristle.

I literally (heh) don’t even know what we’re talking about when we’re talking about “community” anymore, but I have to assume it involves a $300 a month membership and a cold plunge, probably.

People in the “wellness community” don’t actually give a fuck about the loneliness epidemic—they care about the statistic they heard that said that the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

Maybe I should just take up smoking. I mean, when you think about it, it provides you with all of the hallmarks of self-care; taking breaks, getting outside, “being in community”, i.e., shooting the shit with friends, BREATHWORK… If I smoke 6 cigarettes a day, but I’m doing it outside with friends, will I actually live longer? Because I’ll do it. And so would a lot of other people if you sold it that way.

Smoking, but this time, for your health. How the pendulum swings.

I’m being facetious. But only partially. This is the sort of meandering logic that gets used for most self-care trends. I have no data to back it up, but I actually think that this is part of why smoking is making a comeback (that and glamorization of all things analog and a bit messy). If smoking becomes a wellness trend in 2027, come back and find me.

The fact that community is becoming a wellness trend—often with an aesthetic and hefty price tag—is very telling to me. Very exposing of the larger game at play here. Because upon hearing “loneliness kills”, the impulse wasn’t to rebuild the free, accessible infrastructure of community, and ask why we’re all too exhausted and automized to connect. It was to commodify connection—sell us Community as a product: friendship coaches, curated community memberships, networking events with entry fees, apps that gamify making friends.

Here’s what I see happening:

People who are into self-care and wellness as a lifestyle seem to be lonelier than most. Maybe because they’re more self-aware, but probably because self-care and wellness, in their modern application, have become very lonely, isolating, dare I say narcissistic practices. We spend all of our time perfecting routines to make us the most optimal version of ourselves—one that is snatched, with clear skin, perfect sleep, no inflammation, no friction, no fun. Living perfect little lives in walled-off gardens.

But inevitably, the garden walls become walls of a solitary confinement cell. Turns out, perfection is a solo pursuit. Other people? Too many variables. I mean, it’s in the name. SELF-care. Not care for myself as a part of the collective, but for me and me only.

When self-care becomes a commodity, it ultimately becomes selfISH. But not in a, I can’t pour from an empty cup, but my oxygen mask on before helping others, kind of way. More of a, I’m going to do these things as a means to justify avoiding obligations and relationships and generally shitty behavior disguised as the former, kind of way.

What’s that, you say? Being lonely is really bad for me? Well, what do I do about that? Maybe… I should go out and make some friends?

That’s not necessary! Here, just buy this membership. All the benefits and none of the inconvenience. It’s actually better for you!

And since you already pay for and invest in your wellness, you’ll have no problem in paying for community. And so, community becomes yet another necessity-turned-luxury, stripped from you so that they can sell you the watered-down version.

Now our social lives are just another optimization tool.

It must not be inconvenient. It must not interfere with our routines. Our fun must fit within the bounds of optimization. Or, better yet, be for optimization—actually, if I can do what I was already going to do with other people around, that would be great. Sweating in a room full of people that I don’t really want to talk to? Excellent. Take my money.

If our fun isn’t productive, it’s moot. I can’t go out drinking on a Friday night because of sleep… and drinking. But 7 AM on a Saturday at a coffee shop with a mid DJ and a bunch of people who just want to take a pic so they can say, “see, care about my health AND I’m still fun” with the subtext that they’re only willing to do anything so long as it doesn’t interfere with their self-optimization journey.

If other people are involved, it’s because they're being used as tools. Same as an LED mask, meditation apps, and creatine. “I need to be in community,” people say. So they join run clubs, take classes, buy memberships, and still complain about how hard it is to make friends because they didn’t actually show up to try to make friends. They didn’t initiate any conversation at all. They just thought that being a warm body among other warm bodies was enough.

This whole thing was spurred by a video I saw of Dan Buettner (the Blue Zones guy) talking about how people in Blue Zones party and drink regularly that sent me into a tailspin. He was saying (in a way that was meant to look like he was having a conversation on a podcast but was almost certainly talking to no one), that these things are a “longevity hack” because of the “physical activity” and strengthening of social bonds.

Hanging out. A hack.

The dissection and commodification of normal human behavior at its finest.

This is how things that are supposed to be fun and nutritious become just another thing to check off the list for the sake of your “wellness”—when we do them just because they’re a “hack” to help us live longer.

This is why I’m dubious of trends like soft clubbing and wellness parties. They take something that’s supposed to be an organic, serendipitous, lived-in experience and turn it into a highly-Instagramable spectacle, with an entrance fee, where everyone is just there for themselves and their own, individual wellness. Not to connect, not to have interesting, nutritious conversation, but to show people how much you care for yourself.

and they all got eachother’s instas and unfollowed a week later

Commodifying connection destroys the thing it claims to provide. Because real community isn’t curated, optimized, or transactional. It’s messy, spontaneous, and crucially—free (or low cost).

Some things are meant to be by-products—not causes or aims. Community for the sake of community is ultimately hollow, and naming it makes it lose its power. “Community” is not a goal. When we say “I need to find community,” we’ve already lost the plot. It’s like pouring flour in a bowl and wondering why it’s not a cake. Community emerges as the residue of shared pursuits. Through working towards a shared goal—through mutual reliance. In the wake of shared rituals and rhythms.

In the 17th century, coffeehouses were referred to as “penny universities”—places where, for the price of admission of a 1¢ coffee, academics, artists, and intellectuals could gather, debate, read, and learn from scholars. They were seen as dangerous, immoral, and seditious. And yet, it’s where the enlightenment took root, and where the ideas of the scientific revolution spread.

Now, all we have are sanitized, algorithmically curated spaces that encourage individualism. Without the friction, there is no spark. No fire. We want things to be easy. Low stakes. But from that, we only get a low-stakes life. You don’t get things like the enlightenment from coffee shops where everyone is on their laptop with headphones on.

And maybe it doesn’t even have to be anywhere near enlightenment. Maybe it’s just to shake ourselves awake.

As Joan Didion put it:

What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you’re alone with your self and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you to just live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it, to look at it, to witness it. Try to get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.

I think of all of the things that have been sequestered from society and made a commodity by the wellness industry, and have made us worse off as a result. Saunas, run clubs… We can no longer dance because we’re human, and it’s what we do; we do it because it is good for us. We can no longer go out in nature because we ARE nature, we do it because it’s good for us. Even the idea of “third spaces”—things that are just supposed to be inherent to human society—are becoming pay-to-play.

People need a sense of place. Somewhere where they belong. To a place. A culture. A real community. When a person is disconnected, they have no reason to care about what happens to it. That’s why the world feels so untethered—so many people cut off from a sense of belonging. When we don’t feel that, we extract, we consume, we think only about ourselves. We become nasty. Divisive. Cold.

I’m not saying that you can’t do and enjoy these things. I have and do with some regularity. If you want to join a run club, go to a cold plunge meet up, or make some friends on an app, please do. It definitely beats being alone. But more often than not, they are not a substitute for real community.

Community isn’t something you pay for, subscribe to, and it certainly isn’t meant to be squeezed in between your morning routine and pilates. It’s the byproduct of a life lived in tandem with others. And the moment we try to curate, manufacture, and aestheticize it, it loses its power.

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