How Capitalism Creates Barriers to Wellness

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“The true tenets of wellness are all free. Being in nature, meditating, eating whole foods.”

- Gwyneth Paltrow (taken from her interview with the New York Times, entitled “Gwyneth Paltrow is all Business”)

Full disclosure: this isn’t actually an article about Gwyneth Paltrow, in case you hadn’t guessed – I’m sure most of us already know more about jade eggs and Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina candles than we ever needed (or desired) to know. However, maybe some of you crave more updates… I don’t know, nor am I here to judge, but there are definitely plenty of other online articles that will bring you up to speed!

I chose this quote because it got me thinking… It bothered me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. After all, it was probably a completely well intentioned comment…

I guess it made me reflect upon what exactly it is that niggles me about the wellness industry, despite being passionate about wellness myself.

In all fairness – in an ideal world – the above quote would be absolutely true. In fact, the core of why I’m a socialist is the fact that I want to live in a society where this quote would apply equally to everyone; where we would all have equal access to food, time spent relaxing in nature, and free time to spend on meditation.

It’s definitely an important thing to strive for – a world where we all have equal access to the basic tenets of wellness. Unfortunately, we’re not there yet, and have a lot of work to do as a society before we reach that point.

The reality is, living under a capitalist system means the true tenets of wellness are not free. We all have to pay for food, water, shelter, electricity, and all the other basic things we need to have a fighting chance of living a healthy lifestyle.

For the elites of our society (big corporation owners and celebrities, for example) these things may take up such a small percentage of their income that their cost seems inconsequential, but for most of us they take up the vast majority (if not all) of our incomes – and that’s just those of us who are fortunate enough to even have access to food, clean water, shelter and electricity.

According to the Food Aid Foundation, 821 million people – one in nine – go to bed on an empty stomach every night. One in three suffer from some form of malnutrition.

Even in the UK alone (one of the richest countries in the world) 1.9 million people required food bank parcels from April 2019 to March 2020, according to the Trussel Trust. During the Covid 19 virus, food bank use increased even more, with 50,000 food parcels being issued by the Trussel Trust in the first week of the UK lockdown.

Furthermore, a 2019 study (commissioned by Petit Filous) found that one in three children in urban areas of the UK have never been for a walk in the countryside (taken from a nationwide poll of 1,500 parents with children under the age of eleven). 86 percent of parents said that they thought their children would be happier if they were able to play outside more often.

780 million people across the world do not have access to safe drinking water, according to the CDC (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention).

Clearly, we don’t all have the same access to wellness. We don’t even have the same access to very basic human rights.

I’m not writing this to judge or guilt trip anyone for pursuing their own personal wellness journey. It’s everyone’s right to do so, and not something to feel guilty about. I truly believe that to do so is something we all deserve. I do think it’s a problem that not everyone is getting the opportunity to pursue this though, and a problem that we should all be aware of, and not deny the existence of.

To be clear, I fully believe things such as whole foods, nature and meditation CAN have a significant impact on our wellbeing, including our mental health. As someone who struggles with their mental health, and is still finding ways to manage it, these are all things that I find beneficial.

When it comes to the “wellness industry” though, I have my reservations. I feel uneasy about the concept of “wellness” being turned into a product to be sold to us – all the more so when this product seems to be marketed primarily to an elite class, and is not accessible to most people around the globe.

Ok, I know I said this wasn’t about Gwyneth Paltrow, but I guess I lied. I want to include another quote of hers that’s been playing over in my mind, creating internal moral and ethical dilemmas left, right and centre: “It’s crucial to me that we remain aspirational” (from another New York Times article called “How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 million”). I’ve been turning this quote over in my head because to me aspirational wellness seems like a bizarre concept – being the best at wellness… winning at wellness? Being the poshest, most wellest person in the world? For me at least, this isn’t how I view wellness at all.

For many of us, part of our wellness journey involves unpacking the conditioning we’ve internalised that wealth=worth. For many of us, part of our wellness journey is a rebellion against the hyper-consumerist, capitalist culture we live in; a process of unlearning the idea that we’re defined by our possessions.

For those of us who view wellness this way, we see it as a way of finding fulfilment in something other than material wealth, image or social status. It’s about getting getting in touch with who we really are as a person – our “authentic selves”… or something. Either way, for many of us the idea of boasting about having the most expensive yoga mat in the room is kind of antithetical to what we’re aiming to achieve.

For me personally, it’s been absolutely vital to my wellbeing to stop comparing myself so much to others who are more privileged, and to stop second guessing my own worth based on superficial and material things. To me, this type of “cash positive” (as GP labels it) aspiration is the polar opposite of what I’m… well, aspiring to. Of course, that’s just how I feel about it, and other people may have a different perspective on wellness. It’s a very personal and subjective thing. This particular branding of wellness just doesn’t fit well with me.

I also have concerns about some of the messages coming from the wellness industry. We’re bombarded daily with motivational quotes and slogans, such as “Just do it” and “No excuses”. I’m not saying these quotes are necessarily harmful in themselves, or that they can’t be helpful to some people, BUT they do feed into an overall message that wellness is something we either choose or don’t – something we’re either willing to work for or not.

The problem is, it’s far more complex than that for most people. Whilst mindset or lack of motivation may be the sole thing that’s holding some people back, others have genuine, tangible barriers that cannot always be overcome. Sometimes there are valid excuses. Sometimes people can’t “just do it”. It’s not always that simple.

Being treated as if you’re just making excuses – as opposed to having real barriers that are preventing you from having access to something – can leave you feeling very invalidated, and negatively impact your self esteem and mental health. Surely anyone who genuinely wants to promote wellness would not want people to feel this way?

In my personal life, I’ve encountered many barriers to wellness (health wise, finance wise, accessibility wise…) and I know most other people do too.

Some of the barriers have existed in my own mind – negative self talk, low self esteem, lack of self belief… I could go on…

However, there are plenty of examples of physical barriers that I’ve experienced too – one of the the main ones being lack of professional support due to an underfunded and overstrained National Health Service, resulting in me not getting the treatment I needed.

Another obvious (and common) barrier is money – with enough money I could have paid for the exact therapy I needed. Unfortunately, for me (and for most people) this wasn’t an option.

That’s not to mention the trauma and mental health conditions myself and so many others live with on a day to day basis. This too makes wellness harder to achieve.

Dealing with having a mental health condition is made much tougher by living in a society where we experience so much stigma for even having a mental health condition. This can significantly impact someone’s emotional well-being, and also hold them back financially.

For wellbeing to be accessible to everyone, I feel mental health stigma must also be challenged, as well as the most obvious goals of eradicating food poverty, fuel poverty and homelessness. After all, lack of mental health support can often result in unemployment, poverty and even homelessness.

So, is there any way that we can maintain a capitalist system and live in a society where wellness is accessible to all? In my frank opinion, no (sorry to be a downer).

Unfortunately, capitalism isn’t conducive to equality. In fact, it thrives on inequality; it requires inequality to even exist. For capitalism to be maintained, there must be “haves” and “have nots”. There must be people at the bottom, working hard to create profit for people at the top. This is the inherent nature of the system.

The class system ensures that the elite class are able to hoard the majority of the world’s wealth, and have the most access to resources, whilst those at the bottom create the wealth that the elite class live off.

In my view, the system is too unethical to be able to claim that it promotes wellness.

What bothers me most about corporations making “wellness” into a trend, brand or product is that whilst the tenets of wellness Paltrow lists are not free for all, they are things that I believe are human rights. Therefore, the wellness industry is one of many examples of capitalism taking basic things away from us, and then selling them back to us at an extortionate price – often a price that only a privileged few can afford.

Take Coca Cola: a company that takes control of aquifers in communities around the world, causing severe water shortages in areas where there is already a lack of water, amongst other human rights violations. It then sells us bottles of Coca Cola Life, claiming to be environmentally friendly. The irony is astounding (or at least it would be if anything about this society surprised me anymore).

Is it any wonder that people are struggling to live their “best lives” when they’re struggling to even survive, and meanwhile our society is controlled by corporations committing humans rights violations? As much as I’m willing to sing the praises of mindfulness and meditation in terms of what they can do to improve mental health and feelings of wellbeing, no amount of either of these things will fix these societal issues.

Something else I think is relevant to this is the concept of rugged individualism; the idea that we’re all responsible for ourselves, and only ourselves. This concept prioritises self reliance above all else. Some of the messages from the wellness industry slot pretty easily into this individualist way of thinking. The emphasis tends to be placed on our wellness as individuals – not as a society as a whole.

The problem with this is, our wellbeing and our society are inherently interconnected; people aren’t starving due to a cruel act of God, but due to living under a system which ruthlessly exploits both people and natural resources. In these times, poverty is avoidable. It is not an inevitable eventuality, but a man made phenomenon. It is something that’s manufactured by an elite class.

If we really want to live in a society where wellness is something that’s accessible to everybody, maybe we need to stop viewing wellness as competition – or purely a personal achievement – and start viewing it as something which involves all of us.

Whilst I see no problem with anyone working towards being the healthiest version of themselves that they can be, I think it’s important to stay mindful of the fact that everyone has differing levels of access to wellness. As well as being aware of this, I think we need to reframe the way we look at wellness as not only being a personal goal, but a societal goal as well.

For me personally, the wellness of our society as a whole is something I see as impossible to completely separate from my personal wellness. I believe that both are intertwined, and are (to some extent) reliant on each other. I don’t frame it as an either/or thing – ie. my wellness vs. other people’s wellness.

I don’t think this necessarily even has to be a matter of altruism, but just of common sense. It’s a no-brainer; if our lives are connected, doesn’t it benefit us all to nurture our society as a whole?

I don’t want this to go in too much of a hippy direction, but I can’t help feeling that to heal ourselves as individuals, we need to work towards healing society too. As long as we live in an poverty stricken, war-torn world, can we really ever claim to have achieved complete wellness?