Contemporary wellness culture often presents itself as a new and enlightened response to the stresses of modern life. From clean eating and fitness routines to mindfulness practices and holistic healing, wellness is framed as a pathway to balance, fulfillment, and personal growth. However, wellness culture is not new. Rather, it is a modern revival of nineteenth-century life reform movements that emerged during periods of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and social upheaval. In both historical moments, wellness practices functioned as responses to widespread anxieties about the body, nature, and the perceived harms of modern life.
During the nineteenth century, life reform movements promoted dietary discipline, physical exercise, and moral purity as ways to counteract the alienation produced by industrial labor and crowded cities. These movements reflected fears that modernity was weakening both the body and the spirit, disconnecting people from nature and traditional values. Similarly, contemporary wellness culture arises in an era marked by technological saturation, economic precarity, environmental crisis, and declining trust in institutions. Once again, wellness promises a sense of control and restoration, offering individuals tools to “fix” themselves in the face of systemic instability. This historical continuity suggests that wellness culture is less about health itself and more about managing social anxiety during moments of uncertainty.
Wellness reframes health as an ongoing personal responsibility rather than simply the absence of illness. Health becomes something to constantly pursue, optimize, and even display. Under this framework, wellness turns subjective and moralized, where being healthy is no longer just a physical state but a reflection of one’s discipline, motivation, and values. This shift places intense pressure on individuals to continually work on their bodies and lifestyles, turning self-care into a lifelong project of self-improvement.
When wellness is framed as a personal achievement, failure to attain it is often interpreted as a personal flaw. Structural factors like income inequality, racism, environmental exposure, labor conditions, or access to healthcare fade into the background, while individuals are blamed for their own health outcomes. In this way, wellness culture aligns closely with neoliberal ideology, which emphasizes personal responsibility and self-management while minimizing collective or institutional accountability.
Both historically and today, wellness practices tend to be expensive and most accessible to middle and upper-class individuals. Organic food, gym memberships, supplements, wellness retreats, and alternative therapies all require significant financial resources. Rather than challenging inequality, wellness culture often reinforces it by presenting health as something that can be purchased. Those who cannot afford to participate are implicitly framed as less disciplined, less informed, or less deserving.
Ironically, wellness culture can intensify feelings of inadequacy rather than relieving them. By promoting narrow ideals of beauty, productivity, and self control, it creates unrealistic standards that many people cannot meet. The promise of wellness as a solution to stress and dissatisfaction ultimately masks broader social problems, reframing them as individual deficiencies that can supposedly be solved through consumption. In this way, wellness culture not only fails to address inequality but actively disguises it.
Feminist critiques of wellness culture further highlight these dynamics, especially the concern that wellness encourages a turn inward rather than collective action. While rest and care undeniably matter, the emphasis on personal well-being can quietly pull attention away from structural issues like labor insecurity, unaffordable healthcare, or social inequality. Instead of organizing for change, individuals are encouraged to manage their own stress and optimize their personal lives.
This inward focus can be especially troubling given how wellness culture disproportionately targets women, positioning self-care as both a moral obligation and a form of empowerment. In practice, this often translates into increased pressure on women to regulate their bodies, emotions, and productivity while leaving underlying power structures intact. Wellness becomes a way of coping with inequality rather than challenging it.
In contemporary wellness culture, physical appearance is often taken as evidence of virtue, discipline, and worth. Thinness, fitness, and youth are read as signs of self-control and success, while bodies that fall outside these norms are stigmatized. This blending of health, beauty, and morality carries serious consequences, especially for marginalized communities whose bodies already face scrutiny and exclusion. When health becomes a moral judgment, wellness culture can legitimize stigma, shame, and discrimination under the guise of self-improvement.Â
If wellness culture repeatedly emerges during moments of social and economic instability, it raises an important question: What might alternative approaches to health look like? Rather than reinforcing unrealistic individual self-discipline standards and consumerism, a more just vision of health would address structural conditions that shape well-being. This could include policies that ensure universal healthcare access, fair labor practices, safe housing, and environmental protections. Such approaches would recognize health as a collective and social concern rather than a personal moral achievement.
Ultimately, individual health is important, but by changing what defines us as “healthy” and shifting some of this focus from individual bodies to collective conditions, we can begin to imagine forms of health that promote care, equity, and shared responsibility rather than shame and consumption.