Toxic wellness and The White Lotus

Wellness has not exactly bathed itself in glory during the pandemic. Over the last 18 months, it’s probably made the COVID crisis worse, spreading misinformation, anti-vaccine propaganda and far-right conspiracy theories.

The pandemic has brutally exposed wellness for its irrationalism, hyper-individualism, and homicidal selfishness.

Even before last year’s shit-show at the fuck-factory, wellness looked pretty silly.

I blame Gwyneth Paltrow, who held up an over-priced mirror to wellness’ ugly face. Her online shop and Netflix show, Goop, received much-deserved mockery for flogging ridiculous wellness products like a psychic vampire spray and a candle that smelled of Paltrow’s vagina.

Customers sued Goop when the candle apparently exploded, by the way. Does Gwyneth’s vagina do that too?

The sight of Gwyneth and her employees on their endless healing journey brought home quite how privileged and fatuous the quest for wellness can be.

So it’s no surprise to see several new works take aim at the wacky world of wellness. In pop music, Lorde seems to be channelling her inner Gwynnie in the video for her new song, Mood Ring:

You think it’s satire, but it looks remarkably like a promo for the new LA women-only wellness space, WMN:

Also this week, Hulu and Amazon launch new show Nine Perfect Strangers, about a group of strangers who gather at a wellness retreat run by Nicole Kidman, going full Teal Swan:

Reviews of Nine Perfect Strangers have been mixed, so I skipped it, and instead tried another take on toxic wellness — The White Lotus on HBO / Sky Atlantic / NowTV.

It’s very good. I binge-watched the six-part mini-series this week, and loved it from start to finish. It’s funny, perceptive, and shot in a woozy, Xanax-fuelled style suitable to its theme of hollow epiphanies and privileged pampering.

The White Lotus is set in a luxury hotel on a Hawaiian island, where a group of wealthy Americans arrive for their holiday.

It’s an upstairs downstairs set-up, like Fawlty Towers or Downton Abbey, which is a brilliant way to explore how money, class and inequality soil the pristine sheets of the wellness industry.

Working in that industry myself, I can tell you it is not all sage smudges and scatter cushions. It can be as brutal and exploitative as any other part of the economy.

I could tell you about the wellness festival staffed by unpaid graduate interns, one of whom is selected to be the mistress of the festival owner every year. He’s so transcended materiality, he doesn’t even pay them alimony if he gets them pregnant.

Or the serenity boutique where the staff are constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Or the ’40 years of Zen in seven days’ neuro-meditation lab, whose co-founders are suing each other for fraud.

Or the New Age publisher who is so sick of obnoxious spiritual authors, they’ve decided to focus on books about spirit animals. Or the leading virtue ethics philosopher who is prepared to talk on the theme ‘What Money Can’t Buy’, as long as you pay his $30,000 speaking fee. Or the Indian anti-capitalist eco-warrior, who only ever flies first class.

Once you peel off the skin of the wellness avocado, it can smell pretty funky inside.

At the White Lotus, the staff await their new guests with fixed grins. ‘Don’t be too detailed in your personality’, says Armand, the manager of the resort. ‘Be present, but reassuringly vague. They’re the spoilt only child. And you’re mummy.’

That’s actually great advice for the hospitality industry.

The guests arrive, lugging their emotional baggage behind them.

‘I need a massage’ says rich-but-wrecked divorcee Tanya, played by the brilliant Jennifer Coolidge. ‘Any massage, I’m not picky. Anything but Reiki.’

Tanya latches onto Belinda, who runs the hotel’s spa. She gives what Tanya says is the best treatment she’s ever received (‘and I’ve tried them all’). Belinda becomes her emotional crutch, her magical negro healer.

Tanya insists she dine with her, and even accompany her when she scatters her mother’s ashes in the ocean (this is the funniest scene in the series).

Belinda goes along with all this emotional labour, because money. Money makes us all dance. At the end of the series, she declares ‘you know what, I’m done’. But we’re never done. There is no out!

Also at the Lotus is a couple of newlyweds on their honeymoon — Shane, a bratty real estate heir, and his new wife Rachel, having second thoughts about marrying for money, particularly when she watches her husband freak out because they aren’t assigned the right suite.

They ordered the Pineapple Suite, and they get the Palm Suite. Shane can’t let this go, and he and Armand’s conflict is one of the funniest plot-lines in the show.

Shane is obviously obnoxious, but alas I could relate to him. He was right! He paid for the Pineapple Suite, he should have got it!

Armond (left) versus Shane

If you’ve ever stayed somewhere swanky, you know how quickly it brings out the spoilt child in you.

In January, while I was travelling in Costa Rica, I stayed at a very fancy wellness retreat on the Pacific Coast.

It was much more expensive than everywhere else I stayed, but a friend was staying there, and I thought it would be a good place to network (I met Esther Perel!) and they gave me 50% off.

Even then, it was by far the most expensive place I stayed on my trip.

The tuk-tuk dropped me off at the front-gate and I was told to wait for a golf buggy to take me to the hotel. I waited, and waited, and finally got impatient and walked to the hotel, for 20 minutes, dragging my wheelie-bag and muttering the whole way.

Then they showed me to my room, which didn’t seem that great for the price. I checked the Wi-Fi, and it was incredibly slow.

I became Shane. I became that person who complains about their room, until the concierge put me in another room where the Wi-Fi worked.

I could see in his eyes: ‘You spoilt western brat.’

Yeah but…if you charge a ridiculous amount of money, you’d better provide a seriously good service!

It gave me a glimpse of the perils of a luxury lifestyle. The more you’re paying, the higher your expectations.

It becomes like the Princess and the Pea — the wellness industry piles on more and more soft cushions for you, but you just can’t get comfy.

And this, by the way, was supposedly a spiritual retreat. A spiritual retreat just for the ultra-rich, so they could stretch in the gorgeous yoga room on the top floor, look down on the ordinary joes below, and repeat like a mantra:

‘We are the peak experiencers. We are the self-transcendent 2%. We’re so evolved, we’re practically a new species.’

There’s something grotesque about the overlap between wellness, spirituality and extreme wealth.

Like, just be grotesquely rich, don’t try and buy a halo as well. You think heaven has first-class seating?

(In fact, this is precisely what most religions have promised the wealthy. Give us your money and we’ll make sure you get priority boarding in the afterlife.).

The wellness industry has even commodified asceticism.

At the resort I was at, you could sign up for a longevity programme which involved intentional fasting.

Yes, the more you paid, the less you ate!

If you’re a really affluent white person, you can afford a full woke scrub-down. Decolonize your colon! Purge your ancestral guilt!

What I don’t fully understand is this: is wellness / spirituality a religion, or a market?

I guess it’s both. But mainly it’s a really, really big market.

About as rich as the Vatican was in the Middle Ages.

But unlike the Vatican, it’s a spiritual economy that’s mainly for the wealthy, and — as the White Lotus shows — it’s the inequality that makes it so icky.

At least the Vatican tried to redistribute some of its wealth and provide education and health for the poorest.

Where are the charities in wellness and New Age spirituality? Where are the vagina-scented candles for the homeless?

You can accuse wellness of cultural appropriation — stealing yoga, shamanism, sweat lodges and every other spiritual practice from non-western cultures and turning them into spa treatments.

You can also accuse wellness tourism of colonialism — in The White Lotus, a Hawaiian member of staff describes how his tribal home was stolen by Americans, before he puts on a grass skirt and dances for the guests.

Money makes us all dance. You too Paula! She’s the woke woman of colour who goes on holiday with the rich white family, and sunbathes while reading Franz Fanon.

From another perspective, however, dismissing wellness tourism as a form of colonialism is a luxury which people in developing countries don’t always have.

Only the well-off can afford to be so virtuous in their economic choices. Everyone else has to hustle, and at least wellness tourism is a way of redistributing income from the west to the rest. Costa Rica, for example, gets 10% of its GDP from tourism.

Still, it’s ugly, when every house on the Costa Rican coast is owned by an American.

Is the wellness industry anti-science? Does it prey on the gullible?

Well, yes, obviously. $1.7 trillion of it is made up of diet, nutrition and beauty, almost all of which is a racket.

Wellness exploits the insecurity of women to sell them a dream of the perfect life. That’s why the biggest wellness influencers tend to be beautiful women, who are not shy about sharing photos of their hot husbands and adorable kids, along with the adverts for retreats, courses and supplements.

You’re buying their online course, but really you’re buying the dream of their life. ‘Let’s optimize the shit out of life’, says Gwyneth, as her staff stare at the White Witch in terror and adoration.

How did it come to this? ‘Self-care’ was originally a feminist slogan from the 1970s, when women campaigned for better healthcare and more control over their lives, their image and their self-esteem.

How did we get from ‘fat is a feminist issue’ to ‘eight poses to get the perfect yoga butt’?

How did we get from Our Bodies, Ourselves — the feminist health classic published in 1970 — to Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom — the trash best-seller by Christiane Northrup, leading anti-vaxxer and promoter of the Qanon conspiracy?

From another perspective, however, you could say the massive boom of the wellness economy is an indicator not of women’s gullibility, but their power.

The Global Wellness Summit estimates that by 2028, women will control close to 75% of discretionary world spending. In the UK it’s predicted that, by 2020, women’s pay will overtake men’s, and that they will own 60% of wealth by 2025, with a similar figure forecast for the U.S. In Britain it’s predicted that a girl born in 2016 will be 75% more likely to attend university than a boy.

As women’s career success and spending power skyrockets, their spending on wellness is also soaring. That’s the reason professional women can afford vagina-scented candles and other stupid shit — they are rich.

And that’s something to celebrate, after millennia of female oppression.

The patriarchy is dead. We’re in a matriarchy now, a goddess-worshipping wellness matriarchy. And yes, it has a tendency to woo and vanity, and yes it commodifies men. You thought it was going to be perfect?

All hail the goddess-worshipping matriarchy

Let me end with a final reason why there’s more to wellness than rich white people getting ozone pumped up their ass.

Wellness emerged in the 1970s out of alternative medicine, holistic health and New Age spirituality.

Those fields in turn emerged as a reaction to mechanistic materialism, and to the biomechanical model of medicine, which emerged in the 17th century and became professionalized in the 19th century.

In the dominant mechanistic paradigm, the body is treated as a machine.

The mechanistic materialist paradigm led to huge breakthroughs in science and technology, but it left an enormous amount out.

It left out the mind, feelings, emotions, belief, faith, story, the arts, ritual.

It was inevitable that alternative health and wellness would grow to fill in that huge vacuum.

As theologian Alan Levinovitz explores in his excellent book, Natural, alternative medicine treats people as people, not as broken machines who happen to have personalities and feelings attached.

It offers them a story about why they’re suffering — even if that story is as dumb as ‘Saturn is in retrograde’ — and hope that the story will change.

It offers them magical rituals to feel more in control, even if that’s something as simple as saying a mantra, skipping breakfast, or taking some magical supplements.

All of this connects to a person’s mind and emotions — which are left out of mechanical medicine — and gives them a story, rituals, meaning.

Today, the world of mainstream mechanical medicine is finally coming round to wellness and holistic health.

The UK’s National Health Service, for example, is restructuring its £130 billion organisation to bridge the gap between mind and body, and between mental and physical health.

It recognizes that good mental health depends on good physical health, and vice versa. So it’s offering psychotherapy to patients even when they’re suffering from a physical illness like cardiac disease or a stroke.

It finally recognizes that a physical illness is never just physical, it involves the whole person — their mind, their feelings, their family, their community.

The NHS has also launched a service called ‘social prescribing’, whereby GPs can refer patients to community services like joining a choir, or a football team, or a meditation group. Because loneliness and disconnection leads to dis-ease. And a pill isn’t always the best cure for that.

Once-fringe treatments like meditation, dance, singing, and even psychedelics are increasingly mainstream.

The future is wellness — it’s just the future is unevenly and unfairly distributed.

So what can we in the wellness industry do about the wellness inequality so expertly skewed in The White Lotus? Besides the obvious like voting and campaigning for fair working wages and quality free healthcare?

Wellness workers can be firm in demanding fair pay for our labour.

We can also try to make sure we’re not just catering to the rich — get the rich to sponsor you to offer your services to the less well-off.

Above all, the wellness industry needs to figure out what religions worked out a millennia ago: how to sell charity to the rich as the ultimate wellness treatment.