There is a problem at the center of any industry built on healing, and it is structural rather than moral. A business that sells recovery depends on the continued existence of the thing being recovered from, which means that the wound has to be maintained. You cannot sell a cure without first selling the wound.The wound appears to be selling well. The Global Wellness Institute put the global wellness economy at 6.8 trillion dollars in 2024, roughly double what it was in 2013, and projected it to reach 9.8 trillion by 2029. It is now close to four times the size of the entire pharmaceutical industry. The fastest-growing part of it, along with wellness real estate, is mental wellness, expanding at over twelve percent a year. That last figure is the interesting one. It is not a measure of how much suffering exists. It is a measure of how much suffering has been successfully brought to market.It doesn’t mean the practices are frauds. Most of them are not. Breathing slowly does change your physiology, therapy helps enormous numbers of people, and there is nothing wrong with a woman wanting a quiet week in nature. The question is not whether any individual thing works. It is what happens to a person when the frame becomes total, when every part of ordinary life has been re-described as something to be worked on.
How ordinary difficulty became a symptom
Over the past thirty years, a large amount of normal human emotions got reclassified. Sadness became a condition. Restlessness became dysregulation. Being tired became a nervous system in need of regulation. Carl Cederström and André Spicer, writing on what they called the wellness syndrome, made the point that a culture like this treats ordinary emotions as errors to be corrected rather than information to be read. Historians of the earlier health-consciousness movements noticed the same loop, and it is worth borrowing their observation, because it explains why the thing never seems to finish. The more thoroughly a culture attends to its own wellbeing, the more inadequacy it generates. The attention creates the shortfall it then goes looking for. Anyone who has tracked their sleep for a month knows the feeling. You did not have a sleep problem until you started measuring.
Furedi and the cultivation of vulnerability
The sharpest account of this came before the wellness boom rather than during it, which is part of why it holds up.
In 2003 the sociologist Frank Furedi published Therapy Culture, Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age. He did not say that therapy is bad or that people should stop talking about their feelings. Therapeutic culture, he argued, is not primarily an enlightened turn towards emotional life at all. It is a new form of conformity, achieved through the management of emotion, and it works by quietly redefining what a person is. The redefinition is the part to sit with. In the older account, a human being was assumed to be reasonably durable, capable of absorbing difficulty, damaged by some events but not by most. In the newer one, vulnerability becomes the defining feature. The vocabulary gives it away. People are at risk, scarred, carrying, holding, working through. All of it presumes fragility as the baseline condition and resilience as the exception, something you have to be taught rather than something you already have. Furedi’s word for this was cultivation, and cultivation is a farming word. Something is being grown here, deliberately, in a prepared bed. Take this cultivation, the market figures and the mechanism completes itself. An industry that has redefined the normal person as damaged has, in the same movement, converted the entire population into a customer base. There is no market in telling people they are fine.
A self that never quite sets
The modern self is a task rather than a given. A century ago, you inherited who you were, from a village, a trade, a family, a church, and the question of identity was largely settled before you got to it. In liquid modernity, identity becomes a project you are obliged to keep assembling, and the process never stops, because a self that is finally set would be a self that stopped needing anything.It applies very well to the self-improvement industry, which sells the one product guaranteed never to arrive. The better version of you is always positioned ahead of you, it is an always moving target. Close enough to give a sense of partial fulfillment, far enough to require another purchase.
Why the bill lands on women
The pattern is not evenly distributed. Wellness is a luxury category marketed overwhelmingly at women, and the journalist Amy Larocca has described the near-impossibility of a woman getting through a single ordinary day untouched by it. The customer was already built. For a century the beauty and fashion industries had trained women to regard their own bodies as unfinished and to pay, monthly, for the finishing. Wellness did not have to create that habit. It inherited the shelf, the magazines and the sense of obligation, and changed the vocabulary from beauty to health, which is much harder to argue with, because health is not vanity. It is responsibility.
Then there is what happens at the doctor. Women are more often told nothing is wrong when something is, and sent home with stress or hormones or attitude as the explanation. A market that takes your symptoms seriously and hands you a protocol is not competing against good medicine. It is competing against not being believed.
Women are already tending: the children, the aging parents, the list can be long. And then came the instructions to turn that same tending inward and perform it on oneself, with the same diligence, and to call it self-care. The word care is doing a great deal of concealment there. A second shift got added to the first, and was sold as a treat.The result is a particular kind of tiredness that looks like necessary process. A woman who has read the books, done the courses, trauma informed yoga, downloaded the meditation app, and still, at the end of it all, has the persistent sense of being behind or not being complete. I remember one of the women’s retreats, a group of different ages, and a lively conversation in which it emerged that every one of us, regardless of age, had tried the self-help books and the various courses, and every one of us still had the feeling of being stuck, of needing to do more. There was always the next course, the one that would finally change how we felt in some significant way. In the end we laughed at our own expense, seeing clearly how we pour our money and our time into an industry that does not sell us a solution but the constant feeling that we should be doing better, and more.
The other possibility
There is a fantasy underneath all of this, which is the belief that we are substantially in charge of ourselves. That with sufficient effort and the right regime, the body and the emotional life can be brought under management. This seem false premise to me and that premise makes people miserable.
There is a possibility almost nobody is offering. A possibility that there is nothing wrong with you. That the work you keep meaning to do on yourself was, in large part, invented for you to do. We built Unmade on that assumption. Three days in the Cederberg for women, running on the premise that you arrive already well, that there is no transformation scheduled, and that nothing about you requires fixing before you are allowed to rest. A cool river, a fire you make yourself, and long walks that do not arrive anywhere in particular.
References
Global Wellness Institute, Global Wellness Economy Monitor 2025, released November 2025. Source of the 2024 figures: $6.8 trillion, double the 2013 size, projected to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029; mental wellness growing at 12.4 percent a year; the wellness economy close to four times the size of the pharmaceutical industry.
Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age. Routledge, 2004, first released in Britain in October 2003.
Carl Cederström and André Spicer, The Wellness Syndrome. Polity, 2015.
Robert Crawford, “Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life“
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity. Polity, 2000.
Amy Larocca, How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time. Knopf, 2025
