On the surface, what the wellness industry is offering feels like an antidote to our fragmented and fast-paced lives. Influencers and companies use words like "mindfulness" or “whole foods” or “self care” to get our stressed out, burnt out buy in. But, somewhere along the line those promises start to morph into luxury services, expensive memberships and supplements you never knew you needed. In her book “How to Be Well” former fashion journalist Amy Larocca explores the blurred line between healing and branding in a $6 trillion dollar industry.

We discuss:

• Why our current wellness craze mirrors 1930s pre-Nazi Germany
• How Abraham Flexner completely changed how we teach medicine in the US for better – and for worse
• Why the spiritual and community void left by declining religious participation leads people to look to the wellness industry for both

Amy says what attracts people to the modern fitness class has parallels to religious practices:

“So if you look at what happens in ritual religious gatherings… You see a lot of that replicated in a lot of these boutique fitness settings. You have ritual, you have music, you have ecstatic movement, you have charismatic leaders, you have a sermon. And these sermons have increasingly moved away from talk of muffin tops and bikini bodies and losing that whatever it is, to kindness, community, thinking about your place in the world, thinking about taking the energy that you are building up in that room and spreading it forward. ”

Relevant Links

• Buy Amy’s book “How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time”
• Read this Wikipedia page on Martine Rothblatt’s robot replica of her wife Bina
• Check out  this article on the impact of the Flexner report on US medicine
• Read the book “McMindfulness” Amy mentions in the episode
• Sign up for Lamar’s SoulCycle class

About Our Guest

Amy Larocca is an award-winning American journalist. She spent 20 years working at New York Magazine as both Fashion Director and Editor at Large. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country, and the London Review of Books, among others. She lives with her family in New York and North London.

Source

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