Wellness sells. It’s a multi-trillion dollar industry with an unlimited growth potential. What is it selling? Everything from anti-aging creams, organic cold pressed juices, glow-in-the dark yoga pants, to detox retreats, medical tourism, costly diagnostic equipment and esoteric and futuristic sounding treatments.The peddlers of wellness are pillars of society – masters, doctors, healers, gurus, and other irreproachables.
The appeal? Who wouldn’t want to be well, feel good, or do a bit of good?
In a world full of ugliness and bad news, wellness offers hope, enlightenment, a sense of purpose. It promotes and promises a healthier, happier, better YOU.
Why is it then that we are sicker, fatter, and more medicated than any post –industrial generations before us? If wellness is all about prevention, what has it prevented?
If Wellness has gone mainstream, then why are lifestyle and preventable diseases at an all time high. Obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic illnesses cost billions of dollars annually. Our average lifespan continues to climb, but instead of adding healthy, productive years to our lives, we are extending our disease -riddled dying days.
If the road to hell is paved with good intention, then, the path to wellness is littered with noble virtues
Wellness thrives on feel-good jargon and breezy sound bites that compel impassioned, smart, well- meaning individuals to make foolish decisions.
Wellness is aspirational at best and elitist at the core.
GET REAL.
Wellness is not a commodity. Our well-being is coded into our DNA. We have not evolved into the most intelligent and triumphant species on the planet by being sickly and weak.
We are wired to be well. So, lets start there.
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