Wake up, do devotional, meditate, yoga, cold shower, one hour without screens, coffee with protein, matcha because coffee is toxic, fruits, fiber – does all of this help you or lead you to exhaustion?
The list grows every year: new skincare steps, an ever-increasing weekly training volume, an endless supplement list. Every new study brings an essential new habit, every podcast a routine that will possibly change your life. Well-being has never been so popular, and people have never been so exhausted.
In the book The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han diagnoses the era we live in as “the systemic exhaustion produced by a world that demands continuous self-optimization.” For him, the disciplinary societies of the past gave way to an achievement society, where people are no longer oppressed by others, but compelled by themselves to endlessly improve their performance, becoming “master and slave of themselves“, It’s no longer your boss holding you accountable, it’s you, in the middle of the night, watching a video about how to wake up earlier.
The numbers confirm what we already feel. According to 2025 data from Wellhub, nearly 85% of workers reported burnout or exhaustion, with 47% forced to take leave for mental health reasons. Based on McKinsey & Company’s Future of Wellness reports, younger generations report higher levels of burnout and worse overall health compared to older people, despite, or perhaps because of, being more exposed to health-tracking content and tools.
The selfcare that turned into an obligation
Self-care, when driven by the logic of performance, starts to look like another work shift. Burnout researcher and coach Neha Shah described this phenomenon precisely: wellness became productivity in gym clothes. The same impulse that fuels high performance at work gets redirected towards the body and mind: the same metrics, the same optimization, the same pressure to improve. Rest becomes a protocol.
Being “healthy” today no longer means not being sick or simply being someone who puts vegetables on their plate. It now means optimizing to the maximum: you need to train like an athlete, regulate your emotions like a monk, and perform like a machine.
And your dissatisfaction at failing to achieve perfect routine optimization becomes fuel for corporations.
The global wellness market reached $6.8 trillion in 2024 and has doubled in size since 2013, with projections of nearly $10 trillion by 2029. The Global Wellness Institute itself admits that the wellness economy continues advancing at an accelerating pace, despite a decline in global well-being on multiple fronts. The industry profits from the distance between who you are and who you should be.
Why Does the System Work So Well?
There is no visible wound, and yet people wake up at 6 a.m. believing they are already behind on living.
Old disciplinary systems worked through prohibition, there was a wall, a rule, a guard. The current system works in reverse: it gives you total freedom and convinces you that any failure is your own. There is no visible barrier. That is why no one knows what to rebel against.
Byung-Chu Han calls this self-exploitation in another of his books, Psychopolitics. It is more efficient than external exploitation because it eliminates friction – there is no negotiation, no strike, no moment where you look at someone else and say “you are exploiting me.” The exploiter and the exploited are the same person.
When the problem is always yours> your lack of discipline, your wrong routine, your limited mindset, the solution also needs to be individual. And individual means purchasable. That is why the system profits more every day.
The Rest That Doesn’t Rest at All
Resting is synonymous with not producing, and apparently no one can simply stop anymore. Idleness became a problem to be solved. The only way to rest without guilt is if your trainer says it’s a recovery day.
Rest only became legitimate when it was prescribed. It’s not those who need rest who rest, it’s those who have permission. Society has internalized an unrealistic sense of productivity: when asked why you’re watching a movie, you explain “it’s to broaden my cultural references.” Everything has a purpose, and that purpose is never just to rest.
Society has fallen ill. So ill that the moment of relaxation is scrolling through social media. When was the last time you did nothing? No screen, no podcast, no music, just still? For most people, that now produces immediate anxiety. Silence stopped being neutral and became the absence of stimulus, which the brain interprets as loss.
Wake up, do devotional, meditate, yoga, cold shower, 1 hour without screens, coffee with protein, matcha because coffee is toxic, fruits, fiber. Does all of this help you or lead you to exhaustion? The question is the same, and the answer the industry doesn’t want you to find is:
Neither. You actually never needed the list.
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The article above was edited by Sofia Bianco.
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