Unlearning the wellness myth

TimesLIVE

09-07-2025

The wellness industrial complex, catalysed by our existential preoccupations of a purposeful life, is estimated to be worth $4.5-trillion, with a growth rate of 6.4% year-on-year, according to one report. Against the backdrop of a complex and entangled world whose accelerating and often violent ways debase the human spirit, a cohesive sense of direction and connection with something beyond ourselves becomes increasingly important. For some, this takes the form of faith-based approaches and particular diets, and for others — like me — that relentless search for self through meditation.
But in seeking, the competing narratives around wellness are loud and difficult to ignore. From the crowd work associated with clickbait headlines on YouTube channels dedicated to horoscopic card readings, to lunar gatherings on Instagram Live feeds, the grammar of wellness requires vigilance — for the rabbit hole is bottomless, with many 'truths' in tow, all vying for attention.
What distinguishes modern wellness, aside from its expansiveness, is its relentless focus on the self as the repository of all improvement. It's trickle-down wellness — the idea that, if you work hard enough on your body and mind, your inner glow will leak out of your fingertips and touch the world. It can be disorienting to see so much profit attached to the notion of 'self-care'.
The fact is unassailable that our bodies do, in reality, keep score of the traumas we've experienced — be it unengaged grief from losing a loved one or a lifetime spent botch-metabolising food that's better suited to fuelling an aircraft than nourishing a living being. On a micro level, the phone that is always on, constantly interrupting one from being present with its endless notifications, is a blight.
That said, the idea that a briskness towards wellness can somehow regenerate the frame externally probably holds water to a degree. But that it can reverse looming mortality? That has to be observed from a vantage point of suspicion.
The more subtle truths — those that do not scream through influencer reels or corporate retreats, lie in the usually unnoticed — how your breath steadies when the body is humbled into stillness; how water tastes different when you've sat long enough to actually notice it; how being barefoot on the earth begins to feel less like a trope and more like a remembering and rooting. It is in these seemingly minor recalibrations that the pursuit shifts from spectacle to sustenance.
So here I am, doing poses on a mat and having taken up a plant-based diet. It illuminates life, yes — but only so far. I am, like Bourdain, inclined to be vested in the eternal search — for it is that search, carried in the spirit of joy and tumult, which is the true marker of a life well lived. And everything else outside that? Well, 'none of that matters anymore'.