When did wellness become about consumerism?

While scrolling TikTok, I come across videos of girls touting “life-changing” products or miraculous gut-healing supplements. Especially when I first started dealing with my gut issues, I was anxious to get my hands on any product with reviews claiming even a minor improvement in symptoms.

While I have that app open, I also have the Notes app open on my phone, where I list the products I would like to purchase eventually. Red-light masks, collagen powder, grounding mats, walking pads, magnesium supplements—a collection of seemingly innocent purchases that could easily rack up to thousands of dollars, all in the name of being well.

Everyone wants an easy answer to their problems. I want a doctor to tell me what nutrient I’m deficient in so that I can simply purchase it in capsule form and take it daily. I want a walking pad so that my pesky outdoor time doesn’t intrude on my working hours and I can optimize every waking second of my life. Bonus points if I chuck on a red-light mask while on my walking pad while taking a zoom meeting. A bit frightening to my clients, but hey, at least I’m well.

But the world of wellness online is starting to look unwell.

I think about the Blue Zones of the world (areas in the world where people tend to live longer lives due to physical activity, low stress, and social interactions, mostly), and I’ve visited several of them. When I visited Sardinia, I didn’t get the sense that the sweet Italian couple who hosted us in their bed and breakfast started their mornings with 10k steps on the walking pad. I didn’t see an Apple watch on their wrists or a slew of supplements stacked in their pantry.

Instead, I saw people who lived in their world, spoke to their neighbors, ate fresh food from their gardens, and walked outside without an intention to meet some arbitrary step count for the day.

Just a short flight from Sardinia, I find myself living now in Milan. As an immigrant (I suppose I’ve been here too long to still call myself an expat), I don’t feel totally immersed in the world around me here. I kind of feel like I’ve been copied and pasted from one work-from-home office to another, now just in a slightly cooler country. I work for an American company, so my hours and my social interactions are still tied to my U.S. life. Despite the healthier habits of Italian people, I have found myself feeling less well since moving here. In fact, my gastritis came on about 9 months after living in Genova.

I started feeling less well as a result of my lack of connection with the world around me, so I started looking towards products and “easy” fixes to heal me.

But that has only made me a few thousand dollars poorer and placed a band-aid on the real wound, which is…

my habits are the reason I’m unwell, not my lack of wellness gadgets.

I don’t need a walking pad; I need to go on regular walks in my neighborhood.

I don’t need to be on 4 different supplements to help ease anxiety; I need to learn the language and talk to my neighbors.

I don’t need more skin plumping creams, botox, laser treatments; I need to stay hydrated and spend less time in front of screens (looking at pictures of perfect people who make me feel like I need botox).

The list goes on and on and on. There is a wellness product for everything that we can already do and produce ourselves.

This is not to say that all wellness products are bullshit. They’re certainly not, and I use and stand by many of them, especially to help heal my gut. But it’s so much easier to add something to cart than to shift your lifestyle to actually improve your wellbeing.

The wellness we are trying to access through the best and newest product is something we already have access to—in here (I know you can’t see me, but I’m pointing to my heart lol).

So this is a call to action (and a reminder to myself), especially as we’re wrapping another prime day (week? I don’t know, I stopped supporting Amazon a while ago), to evaluate your current lifestyle first before making your next wellness purchase.

Before you fall victim to another “unbeatable” deal, are you eating enough fiber? Drinking enough water? Walking and moving around outside of your 6am pilates classes? Are you sleeping enough (7-10 hours)? Did you see the sun today? Did you talk to a friend?

Wellness is for the people. It shouldn’t live behind a paywall, and it certainly doesn’t live in an amazon cart. Wellness is what we do, not what we buy.