When I worked at the CDC, I was part of a team tasked with designing health communication campaigns for populations that were, by most measures, not being reached by existing public health messaging.
We had good data. We had well-designed materials. We had evidence-based recommendations. What we were slower to reckon with — and what eventually drove me out of that work and into a more uncomfortable set of questions — was why none of it was moving behaviour in the communities that needed it most.
The answer, when I finally let myself look at it directly, was not that people lacked information. It was that the information assumed conditions that did not exist: time, stability, access, and the psychological bandwidth that comes from not being in survival mode. The campaigns were built for people who could act on advice. They were failing the people who could not afford to.
Wellness culture makes the same error, at a much larger scale and with considerably more self-satisfaction about the fact that it is trying to help.
What wellness culture is actually selling
Spend any amount of time inside the wellness industry — as a participant, a practitioner, or someone writing about it — and a pattern becomes visible that the industry works hard to obscure. The problem and the solution are almost always sold by the same entity.
Stress is positioned as a personal failure of regulation rather than a structural consequence of overwork and economic precarity. The fix is a supplement, a breathwork app, a retreat, a programme that costs more per month than some people spend on groceries.
This is not incidental to how wellness works. It is foundational. The industry’s business model depends on a continuous supply of people who feel inadequate about their health and have enough disposable income to do something about that feeling. Which means it is structurally oriented toward a specific demographic: people with money, time, and the kind of stable baseline security that allows for discretionary spending on optimisation.
The people most affected by the conditions wellness claims to address — chronic stress, poor sleep, inadequate nutrition, bodies worn down by physically demanding work — are the people least served by the industry’s solutions. This is not a bug. It is, in the most literal sense, a feature of how the market is structured.
Rest as a class marker
The wellness industry’s obsession with rest — sleep optimisation, recovery protocols, rest days, slow mornings — operates as though rest were simply a matter of prioritisation. You choose to protect your sleep. You choose to build margin into your day. You choose not to check your phone in the first hour of the morning.
This framing erases the material conditions that make rest either possible or impossible. A person working two jobs to cover rent does not have a slow morning. A single parent doing the school run before a shift that starts at seven has not deprioritised recovery — they have been priced out of it by the conditions of their life.
The night-shift worker whose sleep is structurally fragmented is not failing to optimise. They are doing what the economy requires of them, in a body that is bearing the cost of that requirement.
When wellness culture frames rest as a practice and a choice, it quietly locates the problem inside the individual rather than inside the conditions the individual is navigating. That is a sleight of hand with significant consequences, because it redirects both attention and energy away from structural causes and toward personal solutions that are only available to people who already have enough.
The nutritional advice problem
I spent years watching how mainstream wellness nutrition advice lands when it meets real food environments. The advice is, in the abstract, often reasonable enough: eat more vegetables, reduce processed food, cook from whole ingredients, pay attention to what your body needs. But the abstract is not where people eat.
Whole foods cost more than processed ones, consistently and significantly, especially in communities that have been systematically underserved by grocery infrastructure. Cooking from scratch requires time, equipment, and the kind of low-stress domestic environment in which cooking is a pleasure or at least a neutral activity rather than one more demand on an already depleted person at the end of a long day.
Farmers’ markets — the apex symbol of wellness food culture — are disproportionately located in neighbourhoods where the residents already have the highest rates of diet-related chronic disease prevention awareness and the lowest rates of diet-related chronic disease.
My own family’s relationship to food growing up was practical, communal, and culturally specific in ways that bore no resemblance to the clean-eating frameworks I later encountered in yoga studios and health publications. The food was not aspirational. It was real, it was shared, and it worked. The wellness industry would have looked at it and found things to fix. That tells you more about the industry than it does about the food.
The yoga studio as case study
I taught yoga for close to a decade. It was, in many ways, the most useful research I did into how wellness culture actually operates, because I was inside it long enough to see both what it offered and what it systematically excluded.
What struck me most consistently was not the physical practice — which is genuinely valuable and accessible in its original forms — but the sociology of who was in the room.
The studios I worked in were overwhelmingly populated by people who were already relatively healthy, already relatively resourced, and already in possession of the time and money that class attendance required.
The people most likely to benefit from stress reduction, from body-based practice, from community and structure — the people my public health training had taught me to think about first — were almost never there.
The studio did not fail those people through malice. It failed them through pricing, location, scheduling, and the particular cultural register of wellness spaces, which communicates legibility to some people and exclusion to others before a word is spoken.
Walking into a room where everything — the aesthetic, the language, the assumed income level, the body types celebrated on the wall — signals that this space was not built for you is a form of structural exclusion that is rarely acknowledged and almost never fixed by adding one scholarship spot.
What a structurally honest wellness conversation would require
I want to be careful here about what I am and am not arguing. I am not arguing that the practices wellness culture promotes are without value. Adequate sleep matters enormously for physical and cognitive health. Movement is beneficial. Stress management has measurable positive effects on health outcomes. Nutrition shapes long-term wellbeing in ways that are well-supported by the evidence.
What I am arguing is that presenting these practices as universally accessible through individual choice, while selling products and programmes that require significant disposable income and time affluence to access, is a form of dishonesty that has real costs.
It shifts responsibility for structurally produced health inequities onto individuals who are already bearing the largest share of those inequities. It generates a market out of inadequacy and then congratulates itself for caring about health.
A structurally honest version of this conversation would start somewhere different. It would ask why the conditions that produce chronic stress, sleep deprivation, poor nutrition access, and limited physical activity are distributed so unevenly across income levels.
It would look at working hours, at housing precarity, at food environment policy, at the ways that economic instability produces exactly the physiological states that wellness claims to remedy. It would be considerably less marketable and considerably more useful.
My partner works in an emergency room. The downstream consequences of the health failures that wellness culture skims past — the ones that arrive through the ED doors — are not abstract to either of us. They are specific, they are preventable at the structural level, and they are largely absent from an industry that is much more interested in selling the solution than examining the problem it profits from producing.
That gap — between what wellness promises and what the evidence says would actually help — is not getting smaller. It is, if anything, getting wider and more expensive. Noticing that is not cynicism. It is the beginning of a more honest conversation than the industry has any financial incentive to have.
