Americans Spending Thousands on Wellness to Fix Health Problems Caused by Spending Thousands on Wellness
Nation’s $5.6 Trillion Wellness Industry Sells Solutions to Problems It Creates While Asking If You’ve Tried Magnesium Glycinate and a Cold Plunge
- Wellness culture has become the most expensive hobby disguised as medical necessity.
- Americans now take seventeen supplements to achieve the health their grandparents got from going outside.
- Cold plunges are what happens when billionaires discover discomfort and sell it back to everyone else.
- Somewhere in Austin, a man is biohacking his cortisol levels while his cortisol levels spike from biohacking anxiety.
- The wellness industry has successfully monetized breathing, which is otherwise free.
Wellness Economy Achieves Self-Perpetuating Revenue Model Built on Optimized Anxiety
AUSTIN — Health economists confirmed this week that the American wellness industry has reached $5.6 trillion in global value by successfully convincing consumers that existing in a human body requires a substantial ongoing financial investment in products, protocols, subscriptions, and practitioners designed to optimize systems that functioned adequately before anyone suggested they needed optimization. The optimization process has generated its own stress. There are supplements for that.
McKinsey’s wellness industry analysis valued the U.S. wellness market at over $480 billion and growing, driven by consumer interest in fitness, nutrition, mental health, and appearance — categories that cover most of being alive and ensure that nearly any human activity can be repackaged as a wellness product if the branding includes the words “intentional,” “holistic,” or “ancestral.”
Supplement Cabinet Complexity Now Rivals Hospital Pharmacy
The modern American wellness practitioner maintains a supplement regimen of considerable architectural ambition. Average supplement consumption among wellness-engaged consumers includes magnesium (for sleep), vitamin D (for everything), omega-3s (for inflammation), ashwagandha (for stress), collagen (for skin), creatine (now for everyone), lion’s mane (for focus), and a rotating cast of adaptogens with names derived from traditional medicine systems that are being sold at $60 per bottle by companies founded in 2019.
The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements maintains research on supplement efficacy that is considerably more measured than the Instagram accounts promoting them — a gap between evidence and marketing that the supplement industry navigates by labeling products “not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease” in font small enough to require its own magnification supplement.
Cold Plunges Transforming American Backyards Into Expensive Discomfort Installations
The cold plunge — a tub of very cold water entered voluntarily for health benefits — has migrated from elite athlete recovery rooms to suburban backyards at a cost of $2,000 to $15,000 per installation. Research on cold water immersion confirms real physiological benefits including reduced muscle soreness and mood improvement via norepinephrine release — benefits that are genuine and were previously available by swimming in a cold lake, which is free, but lacks the app integration and the Instagram content opportunity.
One Austin wellness entrepreneur reportedly starts each morning with a four-minute cold plunge, 20 minutes of red light therapy, a cortisol-aware matcha preparation, and a breathwork session — a morning routine so elaborate it constitutes a second job. He has a podcast about productivity. The podcast has sponsors who sell cold plunges.
What the Funny People Are Saying
“My grandfather lived to 94. He never once said the word ‘cortisol.’ He also never spent $80 on mushroom coffee.” — Jim Gaffigan
“Wellness is just guilt with better packaging and a subscription model.” — Bill Burr
“We’re the most medicated, most supplemented, most optimized generation in history and we’re exhausted before noon.” — John Mulaney
Breathwork Industry Successfully Monetizing Activity That Humans Do Automatically
Perhaps the most philosophically interesting development in modern wellness is the commercial breathwork industry, which offers paid instruction, retreats, apps, and certification programs teaching Americans to breathe in ways that optimize health outcomes — a service addressing a function the human body performs without instruction approximately 20,000 times per day.
The American Psychological Association documents genuine mental health benefits from intentional breathing practices, including activation of the parasympathetic nervous system and reduction of acute stress responses. These benefits are real. They are also available by sitting quietly and breathing slowly at no charge, which is an option the wellness industry has not been able to fully monetize yet, though several apps are working on it.
Biohackers Discovering Their Bodies Are Already Doing Most of the Work
The biohacking community — individuals who use data, technology, and lifestyle interventions to optimize biological performance — has generated a culture of continuous self-monitoring involving sleep trackers, glucose monitors, heart rate variability measurements, and blood panels that produce so much data that interpreting the data has become its own wellness anxiety requiring a health coach, a functional medicine practitioner, and ideally a longevity advisor who charges $500 per hour and recommends more magnesium.
At press time, one San Francisco software engineer had accumulated 14 months of continuous health data from four wearable devices and spent approximately $3,200 on wellness products since January. His sleep score was 71. The target is 85. He is taking additional magnesium. His cortisol, as measured by a $400 home test kit, is elevated. The reason his cortisol is elevated is that he is anxious about his cortisol. Wellness is working.
This article is American satire produced through a collaboration between the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer, both of whom are taking magnesium and cannot confirm whether it is helping. Bohiney.com practices American satirical journalism in the tradition of people who are well aware that going to sleep earlier is free and are going to research sleep optimization supplements anyway. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!