This is the excellent foppery of the world, now repackaged and sold as salvation in kale smoothies and overpriced yoga mats, a snake-oil gospel for the overextended and underwhelmed. When we are sick in spirit—a surfeit of our own consumption, both material and digital—we make guilty of our ennui the gluten, the GMOs, the “toxins” that lurk in the shadows of our pantry and the cradle of our guts. As if we were villains by the necessity of processed snacks, fools by the gravitational pull of high-fructose corn syrup, and knaves by the spectral dominance of blue light.
An admirable evasion, indeed, of bio-hacked man to lay his goatish failures at the feet of Big Pharma or Mercury in retrograde, or the supposed betrayal of ancient grains. My parents conceived me in a haze of cheap gin and TV static, under no auspicious constellation save the one that declared them bored and fertile. And yet, by the alchemy of this wellness racket, we are taught to believe that I, rough and restless and human as hell, can be redeemed by the righteous consumption of adaptogenic mushrooms and $80 jars of ashwagandha.
Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest kombucha in the firmament fizzled in my bloodstream. Strip the veneer, and it’s all the same greasy hustle: a diet pill by another name, selling us the fantasy that we can blame the stars—or our hormones, or the pesticides—for our own goatish disposition, for the tangled wreckage of choices made not by destiny, but by us. But the Dragon’s Tail is still a tail, my friends, and the only thing it’s wagging is you.
How many more devils are we going to invent before we talk about money?
How many more abundance doctrines are we going to conjure before we choke on their shine?
How many more sanctified smoothies, meditation apps, and $200 leggings
before we dare to say the word class out loud?
Just how many toxins must we purge, how many chakra charts must we hang,
how many breathwork retreats must we endure
before we admit the poison was never in the air, but in the system itself?
How many more manifestos of self-love can we download
before we ask who profits from our endless search for perfection?
How many cleanses does it take to scrub clean
the fingerprints of capital from the wellness machine?
How many crystals can we clutch, oils can we diffuse,
before we admit that no amount of “high vibrations”
can drown out the grinding roar of the gears?
Oh, the wellness economy—how slick, how seductive, how endlessly forgiving—
preaching self-care while selling us the burden of our own undoing.
Every supplement, every subscription, every self-optimization hack
is another distraction from the simple, terrifying truth:
it’s not your gut, it’s the game.
All this wellness is making you sick.
All this chasing balance has you tripping over the scales.
Every juice cleanse is a hunger strike you paid $300 for,
and every guru’s smile hides the fine print of a pyramid scheme.
They tell you to align your chakras,
but the realignment they’re after is in your wallet.
They tell you to detox your body,
but what they’re selling is the poison of self-doubt repackaged,
the whispered lie that you are broken and only they can fix you—
at a premium, of course.
All this wellness is making you sick,
and it’s no accident, no cosmic alignment of unfortunate stars.
It’s by design—a treadmill of “progress” that only speeds up,
a bottomless pit of products promising wholeness
but delivering emptiness, neatly wrapped in pastel branding.
You can’t yoga your way out of a rigged system.
You can’t meditate capitalism into kindness.
You can’t gratitude-journal your rent into being paid.
But they’ll sell you the dream that you can,
because a desperate customer is a loyal customer.
All this wellness is making you sick,
because the cure was never meant to be yours.