Trail Guide to the Final Frontier
I got sick last week [December 2021] and read three books in three days and together, they helped me put words to the problem I see within the wellness industry.
There are so many different ways society is designed to manufacture disease, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment. Each book describes, in very specific ways, how the individual is manipulated into the cult of culture and capitalism and thus exploited.
Society influences people to become holograms of themselves— totally disconnected from the body they inhabit. Emily Ratajkowski details how the objectification of the human body in the modeling industry forces models to disconnect with ourselves and ignore their truth in her collection of essays My Body. Robert Purser describes in detail how wellness has been commodified as a tool to increase capitalistic resources like productivity, manageability and resilience within unethical systems in McMindfulness. Finally, Amanda Montell shows us how the words we use to speak about ourselves, our leaders and our destinies shape the world we live in her book Cultish.
The following essay details how these books and narratives came together in my mind to help make sense of how the the wellness gained its power and explore their ideas on what to change things moving forward.
The body is the final frontier
Humanity is depleted. People are desperately seeking fulfillment in our lives— doing anything, buying anything to re-secure our time, attention, mindfulness, and communities. Things that, for thousands of years, were innate aspects of life. The languaging used to explain these trends often center the natural human body as innately broken rather than questioning the manmade elements of society.
What if the human body is the final frontier for capitalism? If humans are (or were) the last natural resource left untapped. The language of modern beauty standards and mindfulness/wellness initiatives have engineered methods of extracting and manipulating human resources like beauty and productivity to construct and stimulate profitable markets.
Wellness is a commodity, a source of economic value. Selling it contributes to the national GDP. The truth is, helping people truly attain wellness and beauty would, technically, hurt the economy. Businesses don’t always want us to get better, they want to us to be more productive:
"Like workplace wellness, happiness, resilience, and the positive psychology of flourishing, mindfulness sees the minds and bodies of employees as sources of economic value" McMindfulness, Ronald Purser
The beauty and wellness industry are two separate entitites, but the framework they operate within is essentially the same. They set unattainable standards, create aspirational products designed to chase illusive destinations, and blame the consumer when the product doesnt meet those unattainable goals.
Awareness around this kind of sales tactic is growing in the beauty industry, but just as we take back our power from one industry, it is being directly funneled straight into the next — simply trading one addiction for another.
Leading wellness programs often market their ability to deliver “wellness” on a silver platter so long as the participant surrenders to the process. These programs and processes are often based in capitalist values, which prioritize productivity and profits over individual needs.
These systems are like pipelines that transport natural human resources (productivity, beauty, happiness, resilience) out of the human and into business entities. They keeps us in perpetual debt, stuck selling pieces of ourselves as capital, in order to gain capital, to access wellness products that will hopefully make us feel whole again. It reduces the human value to their output when our true value is unquantifiable.
My Body
Emilys commitment to honoring her body, in her book was an act of radical self care. It felt like watching a victory lap after reclaiming sovereignty over her body in a world that tried to steal it from her. This book—and her life, are proof there is a force within us that cannot be tamed.
What person doesn't know a time when their body has been objectified by an industry? Cast as the ideal consumer for a product you really didn't want, never previously saw a need for, but was eventually persuaded to buy into via skinny tea or workout fads or Spanx.
Children are taught to ignore our inner impulses and conform ourselves to the needs and wants of society. A body that is productive with as little resistance as possible gains as many privileges as possible. So everyone strives to achieve a high return on any personal investment — waiting until they are successful to consider themselves valuable.
"For a long time, I didn’t think my body was worthy of the attention required to take care of it. I expected my body to function, but I tended to ignore it, even when it called out to me." My Body, Emily Ratajakowski
Emily’s experience echos throughout society. The language of modern psychiatry has created a world where people cannot trust themselves. Where experiencing emotions is considered a disorder, rather than a message from the psyche. Emily describes how she "often struggle[s] to delineate what is [her] gut instinct and what is [her] hypervigilant, superstitious mind playing tricks on [her]." (My Body)
As the book goes on, she becomes more aware of the sensations within her body. While her awareness builds, she has to learn how to trust herself and her body. After a somatic embodiment session with her therapist, she affirms her intuitive sense: "my body knows. Of course physical sensations, just like rage, have purpose. They are signals, indicators, meant to lead us to truths. But I don’t listen, for fear of what they might reveal." (My Body)
The problem with intuition is sometimes when you listen to it, you lose something. Social capital, money, a job. Intuition has no loyalty to the structures of society. It doesnt care what we are expected to do, it only cares to relieve any pressure causing dis-ease. This can be scary and destabilizing. It's seen as a threat to the status quo.
By the end of the book, she seems stuck in the paradoxical truth of wanting things to change, and simultaneously unable to let go of the privilege that it's afforded her. Somehow her unwillingness to let go of her privilege seems natural. It belongs to her, because it belongs to everyone.
When she is in labor with her son there is a shift in the tone, an underlying confidence in herself emerges: "It is both so extraordinary and so common, the way our bodies take us through our lives." (My Body) She finally comes to trust herself, her intuition and her body.
The birthing process seems to change people, it gives them a greater sense of their body, what it has the ability to do and how smart it is. When those instincts kick in, women learn to trust themselves: because it's not just one self anymore.
McMindfulness
Economists say businesses are created to solve problems but around the dawn of the 21st century, those problems evolved. Growing awareness of climate change and the destruction of the earth finally slowed the exponential growth of the Industrial Revolution. It’s no longer cool to exploit nature and capitalism needed a new natural resource that could be mined with little resistance.
Mindfulness is marketed as the modern doorway to enlightenment, but the West has just commodifiied this ancient practice to be a tool for building cultural capital. Being a consumer of wellness makes one look more productive, smarter, emotionally intelligent, pretty and overall culturally normative.
"The commoditization of “McMindfulness” has sought to make meditation more efficient, calculable, predictable, and controlled. But this has led to the opposite outcome, creating an uncontrollable consumer commodity that devalues mindfulness. Downloading an app as a digital detox is irrational. Mindful merchants don’t care. They seem to be proud of creating a global branded product, accessible to anyone, anywhere — like a Big Mac." McMindfulness, Ronald Purser
While humans perpetually depleted, wellness businesses are made to be infinitely relevant. Instead of encouraging an unbiased self awareness, they manipulate pain points and pathologize normal human experiences like experiencing wandering thoughts or strong emotions. Instead of teaching participants how to engage these experiences in a healthy way, to gain more self awareness, they teach tools that compartmentalize these experiences to prioritize productivity.
Mindfulness teachers often preach the thought terminating cliche that simply teaching any version of mindfulness will result in a evolution of social morality— even while removing ethics and philosophical thought from mindfulness teachings to make them more palatable to western tastes. It is just enough mindfulness to recognize there is a problem, but the only solution offered is admitting that we, ourselves, are the problem.
Mindfulness is just a tool. It's not sentient or virtuous— neither good or bad. It simply is, it just exists. It can be a tool for social discipline and social evolution. In its current evolution, mindfulness is a tool used to cope with the social injustices of the world. This isn't bad, but it teaches us to quiet the voice inside that craves evolution. It tells us this voice is a saboteur, to not trust it, to box our intuition away as an enemy.
Purser does not want to abolish it from society—he invites us to reimagine what it could be:
"The therapeutic functions of mindfulness-based interventions are clearly of value. We don’t need to stop using them, but we do need to do much more. Calming the mind can help us engage with social, historical and political realities. We don’t need another form of praxis defined in biomedical and universalizing terms. Mindfulness needs to be embedded in the organic histories and local knowledge of communities, empowering them to see how things are." McMindfulness, Ronald Purser
We need to learn how to use mindfulness as a tool, rather than a system of management or discipline. We need to learn how to use it to serve our personal evolution rather than social need for conformity.
Change happens in stages. The world would have ever embraced mindfulness in this way if it wasn't first stripped of its ethical guidelines—capitalism would have prevented it. People would have become too aware of our minds, of the voice inside of them too quickly.
But today things are different. We have new tools that allow us witness the many versions of reality and understand our place within it. Now, it depends where we choose to direct our attention. With a shift in language, awareness and purpose, these tools can be used for social evolution.
Cultish
In the book Cultish, Amanda Montell uses this adjective to describe a type of language that is used to amass fandoms. Cultish — like english, or spanish — forms the opportunity to draw people in, to make them feel seen and then offer a solution that makes them feel loyal to brands and influencers.
Modern marketing in the wellness and beauty industry often uses Cultish language to build the cult followings needed to sustain their brands.
"A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are" Cultish, Amanda Montell
If we think about ourselves as broken things that need to be fixed, we suddenly become ideal consumers— we have an innate problem that will never be fulfilled —because the foundational principle that we are broken is a facade.
Since the introduction of the DSM-5, people have slowly started to pathologize themselves, ultimately reaching peak integration as therapy speak began to take over our daily language. We tend to believe people get what they deserve, but what if we believed everyone deserved basic human rights? What if we took an approach from restorative justice rather than capital punishment (which is just another form of capitalism—the capital being the life you are exchanging for bad behavior).
Currently, society operates on a system of meritocracy. What we value, culturally, is what will be rewarded. This means when our values prioritize profit over human experience, we are encouraged to put our personal needs second to corporate interests. Our need for soical climbing and surviving the hierarchy of society encourages our engagement in the meritocacy.
"Meritocracy is founded on the tenet that people can control their lives in big ways, that as long as they really try, they can pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps. Americans love the mythology that successful people deserve their success while struggling people are simply less worthy." Cultish, Amanda Montell
We are all in a race to climb the social hierarchy, but the rich are not happy or well. Your needs will be not met at an equally increasing rate to your net worth. Even the 1% suffers and dies and no amount of money or merit can stop that. The belief that it can, keeps us working against each other. It keeps us fighting for more capital to survive, without realizing the fight itself is inventing problems at issue.
We talked our way into this messy way of thinking, and we can talk our way out of it. Words are spells. The words we choose form the world around us. If we start speaking about ourselves differently, we will start treating ourselves differently.
Conclusion
You are not innately broken. There is nothing wrong with your brain. Your inability to function in capitalistic society is not a reflection of you (its a reflection of capitalism). We are nature, the structures of society should conform to us, not us to them.
The next evolution of capitalism feels close. If the human body is the final frontier, then once we reclaim our sovereignty, there will be no resources left to exploit. We will need to develop a new economic system that allows us to place value on the the things we can create out of thin air— which is already happening.
Look at the innovation of digital products that require little to no investment to create, and are infinitely, instantly duplicated don’t make sense in our modern world. We need a system that can better define what is valuable in this evolution of etherial offerings.
If that sounds scary, consider if the fear of change is really a fear of the unknown. We all know the world we live in isn't fair, but it's the evil we know. We know how to game this system, if we start over what comes next could be worse.
That is true, but that fear is acting as a kind of Stockholm syndrome on society, where we work with capitalism in hopes that it favors us, but we are still left in a constant fear of rejection. What comes next could be infinitely better, for everyone, for every living thing on this earth. We owe it to ourselves to try….