My friend Suzy and I visit a luxury forest spa before Christmas. Neither of us are really sure what we are supposed to actually do in the luxury spa for three hours. Along with a sauna, steam room and jacuzzi, many of the rooms – “experiences” – appear to simply be designed for sleeping. There is a Scandinavian snug, for example, with a fire and huge fluffy blankets that you can lie under with a view of the forest beyond. I lie blearily on a chaise longue, watching robed figures wander through the trees outside and thinking about Ari Aster horror films. The spa offers a class in sleep as it happens, another in mindful meditation, and a third in skincare, which is just beginning when we arrive. Behind a glass partition, a row of women in identical fluffy white robes all face front. There’s a distinctly Wall-E feel to the whole spectacle. They stare earnestly ahead at an invisible instructor, all gently massaging the delicate skin around their eyes with the fourth finger of each hand in neat, circular motions.
What comes to mind when you think of wellness? It might be colostrum serums, aura points or simply having enough free time to go running. (The word “colostrum” alone is enough to conjure shivers of deep personal failure in my own psyche). A wellness trend I’ve seen forecast in several places for 2025 is “longevity”, which is simply the aspiration to be so healthy that you live longer than everyone else. Maybe it speaks to cynicism on my part, or at least a cynicism about the future, but I’m surprised that younger people want to live forever when the planet is burning. Maybe this cynicism also explains my own approach to new year’s resolutions, which is less aspirational and always just “make it from January 1st to March 20th without doing myself a violence”.
For many of us, the Covid pandemic sounded the death knell for any residual cries to “lean in”. Many Gen X and millennial women worked and cared and parented past the point of burnout. They continue to do so. If the womanly dream of “having it all” has been revealed to be simply “doing it all”, wellness promises something different. It suggests there can be healing from all that striving, that self-care could replace the demand to be a girlboss, hustle or achieve. And maybe this is why wellness is so appealing, promising that a new you might be purchased as easily as a fancy jade roller.
Figuring out how to be well feels dispiriting at a moment when so much of the language of healing and transcending has been absorbed into the vernacular of corporate productivity and self-optimisation. I’m stating the obvious here, but even the very state of wellness as opposed to simply “being well” implies a luxury product we consume rather than something we simply are, a sentiment still perfectly encapsulated by the yoni eggs sold on Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website Goop, designed to be inserted into the vagina to “harness the power of energy work, crystal healing and Kegel-like physical practice”.
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If, on the one hand, we have Paltrow shilling us expensive Kegel toners to fill the aching voids in our lives, in the past year or so I’ve noticed another less glamorous but frankly more useful approach to health and wellness among millennials. This age group are using tools like the internet, AI and the wisdom of crowds to navigate women’s health issues. My cohort are well used to navigating a Reddit wormhole. If we don’t entirely trust the health system to care for our bodies we would rather trust in the hive mind to help us sift through the noise surrounding topics like perimenopause and postnatal depression.
The results are mixed. “Have you tried low-dose naltrexone? How about metformin?” A friend in the States texts me. I’d been complaining about a general unwell feeling for the past few months, tired and achy in my joints. But maybe this is just what getting older feels like? “What are they for?” I ask, quickly googling to discover that the first is prescribed in higher doses for addiction but used at lower doses off-label for numerous purposes including long Covid and the latter is prescribed for diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome. My friend has none of these conditions as far as I know. “I don’t know, Reddit told me it would keep me skinny and make me young,” she quips, proceeding to describe a dizzying list of supplements and medications she calls “biohacking perimenopause”. Alongside the aforementioned, there’s low oestrogen birth control as a precursor to hormone therapy and Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant with stimulant properties. “It’s shocking how much my parenting has improved.”
I notice that many of my WhatsApp groups ostensibly devoted to motherly admin are frequently highjacked to poll health supplements: magnesium, strength training and the best (okay, fine, least worst) hormonal contraceptives. Even though picking up heavy things has always topped my list in terms of boring forms of exercise, it clearly tops the shared list of recommendations for recommended stuff to do as you get older. The shared consensus, too, is that supplements advertised for menopause are simply magnesium and vitamin B at a much higher price tag and not worth your money, however many influencers try to shill you a fancy version of Starflower oil. I add them to my online shopping cart. It’s cheaper than a crystal egg.
Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and lecturer in digital cultures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin
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