The term wellness encompasses an extensive range of activities, such as juice cleansing, meditation, napping, drinking charcoal water, citrus diets, ketosis, halotherapy, talk therapy, avoiding blue light, the Alexander Technique, and forest bathing.
The wellness industry is worth about $4.5 trillion and is growing at 6.4 percent a year.

Wellness encompasses a broad range of activities

The desire for alternative forms of wellbeing is not new. It may even feel necessary. Many of the wellness trends come from indigenous practices. Wellness tourism is not new either. In the early twentieth century, tubercular patients travelled to the desert of New Mexico to breathe the thin, dry air. But what makes modern wellness different is its relentless focus on the self as the base for all improvement.

Wellness is not new

Modern wellness assumes that if you work hard enough on your body and mind, you will reach the top of the world and spread it to people around you. The latest focus is on individual enhancement. It makes sense then that the wellness industry shifted to podcasting. People listen alone to a deeply individualistic medium. While it may seem like a collaboration between host and listener, it is really a one-way dialogue that ultimately leads to an advertisement addressing something essential that you lack.

The trickle-down wellness

The work is never done. We are always one more item away from glory. This quest-like quality is at the centre of modern wellness. Yet, no matter how far you travel, the promise to wellness is always another step away.

Wellness is never complete

In “POOG,” two comics explore the perils—and the absurd pleasures—of a trillion-dollar&nbsp;industry.<div><time data-testid="ContentHeaderPublishDate">March 22, 2021</time></div><picture class="ResponsiveImagePicture-jJiTGL jyYsQg split-screen-content-header__lede responsive-image"><source media="(max-width: 767px)" srcset="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_120, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 120w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_240, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 240w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_320, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 320w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_640, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 640w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_960, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 960w" sizes="100vw"><source media="(min-width: 768px)" srcset="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_120, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 120w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_240, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 240w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_320, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 320w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_640, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 640w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_960, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 960w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_1280, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 1280w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_1600, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 1600w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_1920, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 1920w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_2240, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/c_limit/210329_r38123.jpg 2240w" sizes="100vw"><img alt="wellness" src="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/60523e30027ba95aa5dbbe18/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/210329_r38123.jpg" width="328" height="428"></picture><figcaption class="caption" data-event-boundary="click" data-event-click="{&quot;pattern&quot;:&quot;Caption&quot;}" data-in-view="{&quot;pattern&quot;:&quot;Caption&quot;}" data-include-experiments="true" dir="ltr">Modern wellness can seem less about a cure than about a far-off apex state.Photograph by Elizabeth Renstrom / The New Yorker / Getty</figcaption>About halfway through a recent episode of “<a data-event-click="{&quot;element&quot;:&quot;ExternalLink&quot;,&quot;outgoingURL&quot;:&quot;https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/poog-with-kate-berlant-and-jacqueline-novak/id1537404238&quot;}" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/poog-with-kate-berlant-and-jacqueline-novak/id1537404238" rel="nofollow noopener" dir="ltr">POOG</a>,” a new podcast that is essentially one long, unbroken conversation about “wellness” between the comedians and longtime friends Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak, the hosts spend several minutes trying—and failing—to devise a grand theory about the existential sorrow of eating ice cream. “The pleasure of eating an ice-cream cone for me,” Novak says, in the blustery tone of a motivational speaker, “involves the attempt to contain, catch up, stay present to the cone. Because the cone will not wait.” Berlant, a seasoned improviser, leaps into the game. “And it’s grief,” she says, with no trace of irony. “And it’s loss, because it’s so beautiful, it’s handed to you, and you’re constantly having to reckon with the fact that it is dying, and yet you’re experiencing it.”From here, the conversation begins to warp into almost sublime absurdity. Novak suggests that what she ultimately desires is not the cone itself but the emptiness that comes after the cone has been consumed, or what she calls “the dead endlessness of infinite possibility.” She makes several attempts to refine this idea, in a state of increasing agitation. And then she begins to cry. “Are you crying because you are still untangling what this theory is?” Berlant asks. “No,” Novak blubbers. “I’m crying out of the humiliation of being seen as I am.”At first, listening to this meltdown, I wondered what, precisely, was going on. Novak and Berlant are brilliant comics, denizens of the alternative-standup scene that bridges the gap between punch lines and performance art. They had to be up to something. And then, after several incantatory hours of listening to them talk, it became clear: “POOG” is a show about wellness which is, in a dazzling and purposefully deranged way, utterly unwell. Of course Novak can’t process her desire to have everything and nothing at once; like so much of the language of being “healthy” in a fractured world, her yearning can never compute. “POOG” is not just “Goop” (as in Gwyneth Paltrow’s life-style empire) spelled backward—it’s an attempt to push the wellness industrial complex fully through the looking glass. Each episode begins the same way. “This is our hobby,” Berlant says. “This is our hell,” Novak adds. “This is our naked desire for free products,” Berlant concludes.What is wellness, exactly? The term encompasses a broad range of activities, including juice cleansing, Transcendental Meditation, snail-serum application, buying a Peloton, napping, switching to oat milk, switching to charcoal water, Kegel exercises, sitz baths, citrus diets, maintaining ketosis, HIIT workouts, halotherapy, aromatherapy, talk therapy, past-life regression therapy, microdosing LSD, megadosing CBD, intuitive fasting, avoiding blue light, seeking out red light, reflexology, cathartic-breathing techniques, the Alexander Technique, sensory deprivation, forest bathing, and gargling with Himalayan salt. One report estimated that the entire wellness industry is worth $4.5 trillion, with a growth rate of 6.4 per cent year over year. Paltrow’s Goop—which swelled from a quirky newsletter, in 2008, to a conglomerate that features <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-magical-thinking-of-the-goop-lab" dir="ltr">a Netflix show</a>, conferences, <a data-event-click="{&quot;element&quot;:&quot;ExternalLink&quot;,&quot;outgoingURL&quot;:&quot;https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Plate-Eat-Reset-Heal/dp/1538730464&quot;}" href="https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Plate-Eat-Reset-Heal/dp/1538730464?ots=1&amp;tag=thneyo0f-20&amp;linkCode=w50" rel="nofollow noopener" dir="ltr">cookbooks</a>, a digital publication, and a beauty-product line—is worth two hundred and fifty million dollars alone.The desire for alternative forms of healing is nothing new. Given the bureaucracy of modern medicine, it can even feel necessary, and many of the wellness trends that dominated the pastel, high-gloss Instagram campaigns of the past decade—turmeric lattes, sage burning—were ripped directly from practices that indigenous and non-Western cultures have passed down for centuries. Wellness tourism, too, is an old racket—you see it in the “lunger” movement of the early twentieth century, when tubercular patients racked with malaise travelled to the deserts of New Mexico, chasing thin, dry air and fresh perspectives. (According to the anthropologist Nancy Owen Lewis, the Albuquerque Health Department advertised itself as “the heart of well country.”) Still, previous iterations of health-seeking were largely about finding a public cure for discreet problems.What distinguishes modern wellness, aside from its expansiveness, is its relentless focus on the self as the fount 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,” which became prominent in the feminist and civil-rights activism of the nineteen-sixties, and was advanced by such radical thinkers as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Their idea of self-preservation stressed nurturing one’s body in a society that both dismisses and endangers it. Today’s wellness movement has, at least in its marketing copy, co-opted that language, severing it from its collectivist roots. Now the project is individual enhancement: poreless skin, pliant limbs, a microfloral garden blooming inside your wild and precious gut.It makes sense, then, that the wellness industry has stretched into podcasting. Despite the village it can take to put a great show together, the medium can also be deeply individualistic. Most people listen alone, sealed away in their car or behind the force field of noise-cancelling earbuds. The shows themselves often feel like intimate collaborations between host and listener, but, really, the dialogue always goes one way—and that way often leads to an ad spot. Wellness brands, which flourish by convincing people of some essential lack, are primed for this dynamic.Featured Video

In “POOG,” two comics explore the perils—and the absurd pleasures—of a trillion-dollar industry.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Health

In “POOG,” two comics explore the perils—and the absurd pleasures—of a trillion-dollar industry.

About halfway through a recent episode of “<a data-event-click='{"element":"ExternalLink","outgoingURL":"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/poog-with-kate-berlant-and-jacqueline-novak/id1537404238"}' dir="ltr" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/poog-with-kate-berlant-and-jacqueline-novak/id1537404238" rel="nofollow noopener">POOG </a> ,” a new podcast that is essentially one long, unbroken conversation about “wellness” between the comedians and longtime friends Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak, the hosts spend several minutes trying—and failing—to devise a grand theory about the existential sorrow of eating ice cream. “The pleasure of eating an ice-cream cone for me,” Novak says, in the blustery tone of a motivational speaker, “involves the attempt to contain, catch up, stay present to the cone. Because the cone will not wait.” Berlant, a seasoned improviser, leaps into the game. “And it’s grief ,” she says, with no trace of irony. “And it’s loss, because it’s so beautiful, it’s handed to you, and you’re constantly having to reckon with the fact that it is dying, and yet you’re experiencing it.”

From here, the conversation begins to warp into almost sublime absurdity. Novak suggests that what she ultimately desires is not the cone itself but the emptiness that comes after the cone has been consumed, or what she calls “the dead endlessness of infinite possibility.” She makes several attempts to refine this idea, in a state of increasing agitation. And then she begins to cry. “Are you crying because you are still untangling what this theory is?” Berlant asks. “No,” Novak blubbers. “I’m crying out of the humiliation of being seen as I am .”

At first, listening to this meltdown, I wondered what, precisely, was going on. Novak and Berlant are brilliant comics, denizens of the alternative-standup scene that bridges the gap between punch lines and performance art. They had to be up to something . And then, after several incantatory hours of listening to them talk, it became clear: “POOG ” is a show about wellness which is, in a dazzling and purposefully deranged way, utterly unwell. Of course Novak can’t process her desire to have everything and nothing at once; like so much of the language of being “healthy” in a fractured world, her yearning can never compute. “POOG ” is not just “Goop” (as in Gwyneth Paltrow’s life-style empire) spelled backward—it’s an attempt to push the wellness industrial complex fully through the looking glass. Each episode begins the same way. “This is our hobby,” Berlant says. “This is our hell,” Novak adds. “This is our naked desire for free products,” Berlant concludes.

What is wellness, exactly? The term encompasses a broad range of activities, including juice cleansing, Transcendental Meditation, snail-serum application, buying a Peloton, napping, switching to oat milk, switching to charcoal water, Kegel exercises, sitz baths, citrus diets, maintaining ketosis, HIIT workouts, halotherapy, aromatherapy, talk therapy, past-life regression therapy, microdosing LSD, megadosing CBD, intuitive fasting, avoiding blue light, seeking out red light, reflexology, cathartic-breathing techniques, the Alexander Technique, sensory deprivation, forest bathing, and gargling with Himalayan salt. One report estimated that the entire wellness industry is worth $4.5 trillion, with a growth rate of 6.4 per cent year over year. Paltrow’s Goop—which swelled from a quirky newsletter, in 2008, to a conglomerate that features <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-magical-thinking-of-the-goop-lab">a Netflix show </a>, conferences, <a data-event-click='{"element":"ExternalLink","outgoingURL":"https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Plate-Eat-Reset-Heal/dp/1538730464"}' dir="ltr" href="https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Plate-Eat-Reset-Heal/dp/1538730464?ots=1&amp;tag=thneyo0f-20&amp;linkCode=w50" rel="nofollow noopener">cookbooks </a>, a digital publication, and a beauty-product line—is worth two hundred and fifty million dollars alone.

The desire for alternative forms of healing is nothing new. Given the bureaucracy of modern medicine, it can even feel necessary, and many of the wellness trends that dominated the pastel, high-gloss Instagram campaigns of the past decade—turmeric lattes, sage burning—were ripped directly from practices that indigenous and non-Western cultures have passed down for centuries. Wellness tourism, too, is an old racket—you see it in the “lunger” movement of the early twentieth century, when tubercular patients racked with malaise travelled to the deserts of New Mexico, chasing thin, dry air and fresh perspectives. (According to the anthropologist Nancy Owen Lewis, the Albuquerque Health Department advertised itself as “the heart of well country.”) Still, previous iterations of health-seeking were largely about finding a public cure for discreet problems.

What distinguishes modern wellness, aside from its expansiveness, is its relentless focus on the self as the fount 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,” which became prominent in the feminist and civil-rights activism of the nineteen-sixties, and was advanced by such radical thinkers as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Their idea of self-preservation stressed nurturing one’s body in a society that both dismisses and endangers it. Today’s wellness movement has, at least in its marketing copy, co-opted that language, severing it from its collectivist roots. Now the project is individual enhancement: poreless skin, pliant limbs, a microfloral garden blooming inside your wild and precious gut.

It makes sense, then, that the wellness industry has stretched into podcasting. Despite the village it can take to put a great show together, the medium can also be deeply individualistic. Most people listen alone, sealed away in their car or behind the force field of noise-cancelling earbuds. The shows themselves often feel like intimate collaborations between host and listener, but, really, the dialogue always goes one way—and that way often leads to an ad spot. Wellness brands, which flourish by convincing people of some essential lack, are primed for this dynamic.

Puzzling Through Our Eternal Quest for Wellness

Wellness encompasses a broad range of activities

Wellness is not new

The trickle-down wellness

Wellness is never complete

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