The coronavirus pandemic has pushed many Americans—at least those fortunate not to be deemed “essential workers” in the face of a lethal, government-abetted public health crisis—indoors and further into the insular routines of homebound domestic life. This state of affairs means, among other things, that we are looking at the convulsions of our common world through a glass darkly, from a strategic and self-administered social distance. Which is to say, as The New Republic writer Eleanor Cummins notes, that we’re living in the midst of an unlikely boom for all things wellness-branded.
 
This might seem like the sort of fare for a light-touch social satire, but as Cummins notes, the vogue for wellness runs deep in American consumer culture and has distinctly retrograde political implications—especially when it comes to addressing the great global emergency of climate change. Citing “the past few months of Etsy mask orders and a nationwide home-buying frenzy,” Cummings notes that Americans have swooned headlong into the fantasy of fastidious retreat from the world at large as said world faces unprecedented fallout from rising temperatures and sea levels. “Stripped of political solutions to the degradation of the environment and the existential peril of climate change, Americans have joined a cult of personal empowerment through consumption. Implicit in many of our most desirable commercial goods, and in extreme cases explicit, is the promise that whatever happens to the Earth, its most optimized inhabitants can continue to thrive.”
 
That promise is deeply rooted in Western culture, with notions of self-purification counterposed to physical corruption and pollution in all manner of religious and social contexts, stretching back to ancient Rome and early Christianity and finding perhaps peak consumerist expression in Gwenyth Paltrow’s sprawling self-care empire, Goop. But when it comes up against the brute realities of climate change, the wellness ethos expresses a lethal brand of fatalist individualism, Cummins notes:

Today, many people also live with the persistent dread of a changing climate and an equally devastating sense of inaction. But by combining two separate civic religions—purification and consumerism—wellness has allowed people to purchase spiritual indulgences without modifying their behavior. Philosophy, the bath and body company, bottles “Hope” and “Purity.” A boxed set costs just $40.

As the locus of our fear shifted from divine wrath to industrial engineering, so have our solutions. Both earlier cleansing rituals and our contemporary obsession with the natural “allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal purity,” according to Eula Biss in her 2014 bestselling book On Immunity. Nineteenth-century Londoners might have resorted to “heavy curtains and shutters” to “seal out the smell of the poor and their problems. Our version of this shuttering is now achieved through the purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the promise of purity.” 

The forms this fatalism now takes in the great consumer marketplace are rather numbingly baroque—and work to brand aggressively marketed self-care regimens as a heightened form of environmental consciousness, via an onslaught of dubiously signifying green jargon:

Wellness companies refer frequently to [the] fractured relationship between humans and the land, water, and air that sustain us. “For the most part, people are finding more and more that everyone they know is kind of sick,” Elise Loehnen, chief content officer at Goop, said in a 2017 interview with The Cut. “There are concerns about our food supply, about the rampant use of glycosate. Food used to grow in many feet of loamy soil! I think we’re just depleted. I think there’s a vitamin D deficiency because we don’t go outside, and when we do, we’re always wearing sunscreen. We’re out of touch with the Earth in general, and I just don’t think this is the way we were intended to live.” But Loehnen and her competitors will sell you a sleek, 400-thread-count escape chute: You can practice “earthing” (walking around barefoot) to realign yourself with the planet’s electrical energy, buy “grounding crystals” like tourmaline to balance your “root chakra,” or “sound bathe” on a desert retreat to deepen your relaxation.

Skincare, perhaps the most accessible form of wellness today, excels at such dubious eco-promises. Even the most casual Sephora shopper knows that gels and balms are considered essential protection against the ravages of the outside world. But products formally marketed as “anti-pollution” are now on the rise, according to industry trend data. Despite no scientific research assessing their claims, dermatologists gladly offer their advice on how to protect your skin from smog. In a 2019 piece in Glamour, doctors recommended readers apply antioxidant creams before they leave the house, “limit exposure” by walking down less trafficked roads, and use acids and exfoliants at the end of the day to strip any accumulated grime. If this sounds like too much work, a $145 bottle of Sturm Anti-Pollution Drops promises to protect “against daily pollution and blue light generated by computers and phones to help fight environmental aggressors that cause aging” all on its own. While air pollution has been a concern of the beauty industry for at least 150 years, the careful corporate-speak of “environmental aggressors” seems to gesture beyond the tiny particles that clog our pores and into a new, diffuse realm of dangers, where some of the biggest threats we face are, like carbon, totally invisible.

The way to stir ourselves out of this lavish marketing trance, Cummins suggests, is to recover the original meaning of self-care, which first caught on among Black and feminist activists in the 1960s and 1970s who came to grasp all too well just how the forces of establishment expertise had marginalized their own communities and conditions of medical and material need. Back then, Cummins writes, “the ‘self’ in self-care extended, however narrowly, beyond the boundaries of an individual. It was women protecting their own bodies, and those of other women. It was Black people protecting their own health, and that of other Black people.” We all might do well to recall this core life wisdom as we confront today’s overlapping crises of climate change, authoritarian governance, mass pandemic death and displacement, and racist policing. All the rest, you might say, is goop.

—Chris Lehmann, editor