Wellness commercializes healing

The wellness industry has achieved something remarkable: it has turned the human need for healing into a perpetual revenue stream. This is not accidental. It is the systematic conversion of resolution into subscription.

The subscription model of suffering

Traditional healing aimed for completion. You were sick, you got better, the transaction ended. The wellness industry has eliminated this inconvenient endpoint.

Instead of curing, wellness maintains. Instead of resolving, it manages. Instead of healing, it optimizes.

The business model requires permanent customers, not recovered ones. A truly healed person stops buying products. Therefore, wellness products are designed to provide just enough relief to justify continued use, but never enough resolution to end the dependency.

Commodifying ancient wisdom

Every traditional healing practice has been strip-mined for marketable components. Meditation becomes apps with subscription fees. Yoga becomes branded lifestyle products. Ayurveda becomes supplement regimens.

The transformation process is predictable:

1. Extract technique from cultural context
2. Remove inconvenient spiritual or philosophical frameworks
3. Package as individual consumer product
4. Scale through digital distribution
5. Add subscription or recurring purchase model

What emerges bears the name of the original practice but serves entirely different purposes. The goal shifts from transcendence or genuine healing to customer acquisition and retention.

The pathologization of normalcy

Wellness culture requires problems to solve. When genuine medical conditions are insufficient to sustain the market, new categories of dysfunction must be created.

Normal human experiences become symptoms requiring intervention. Occasional sadness becomes “depression” requiring mood supplements. Natural energy fluctuations become “adrenal fatigue” requiring specialized protocols. Ordinary stress becomes a chronic condition requiring professional management.

This pathologization serves dual purposes: it expands the addressable market while making customers feel dependent on expert guidance for basic human functioning.

Manufacturing inadequacy

The wellness industry profits from your belief that your natural state is insufficient. Every product implies deficiency. Every service suggests incompleteness.

You are not optimized enough. Not mindful enough. Not aligned enough. Not balanced enough. The solution is always external: another product, another practice, another purchase.

This manufactured inadequacy creates what we might call “wellness anxiety” - the persistent feeling that you are not doing enough for your health and wellbeing. This anxiety, ironically, becomes another condition requiring wellness intervention.

The authenticity premium

Wellness marketing emphasizes authenticity, naturalness, and traditional wisdom. These qualities command premium pricing precisely because they appear to resist commercialization.

“Ancient secrets” cost more than modern solutions. “Natural” ingredients justify higher margins than synthetic ones. “Authentic” practitioners charge more than conventional doctors.

The irony is perfect: authenticity becomes the most artificial value proposition. The resistance to commercialization becomes the basis for commercialization.

Spiritual bypassing as product feature

Many wellness approaches offer spiritual bypassing as a core benefit. Instead of addressing underlying causes of suffering, they provide techniques to transcend or transform your relationship to that suffering.

This is valuable to customers because it promises relief without requiring difficult changes to life circumstances, relationships, or social systems. It is valuable to providers because it maintains the customer’s underlying conditions while selling them coping mechanisms.

The suffering continues, but now it can be reframed as “growth opportunity” or “spiritual lesson.” The product becomes the relationship to the problem, not the solution to the problem.

The optimization trap

Wellness culture promotes endless optimization. There is always another level of health, another dimension of wellness, another metric to improve.

This creates the optimization trap: the belief that current suffering is due to insufficient optimization rather than genuine problems requiring direct action. The solution is always more wellness, never less need for wellness.

Customers become trapped in pursuing marginal improvements in metrics that may not correspond to meaningful improvements in life quality. They optimize their way around problems rather than solving them.

Value extraction from vulnerability

The wellness industry monetizes human vulnerability at scale. Moments of crisis, transition, or seeking become customer acquisition opportunities.

Marketing targets people during divorces, career changes, health scares, existential questioning. The vulnerability that makes someone open to genuine healing also makes them susceptible to commercial exploitation.

The same psychological openness required for authentic transformation becomes the attack vector for dependency creation.

The community mirage

Wellness culture promises community while delivering consumerism. Classes, retreats, and programs create temporary feelings of belonging that require ongoing participation to maintain.

The community is real, but it is organized around consumption rather than genuine mutual support. Members relate to each other through their shared relationship to products and practices rather than direct human connection.

When the consumption stops, the community access typically ends. This creates additional dependency: you continue purchasing to maintain social connections.

Resolution as business failure

For wellness businesses, customer resolution represents revenue loss. The most successful products create sustainable, manageable dependency rather than breakthrough solutions.

This creates a fundamental conflict of interest. Providers have economic incentives to maintain customer problems at tolerable levels rather than actually solving them.

The industry selects for approaches that feel helpful without being conclusive. Customers experience enough benefit to justify continued use but never enough resolution to graduate from the system.

The measurement distortion

Wellness culture emphasizes tracking and measuring progress. Apps quantify meditation minutes, sleep quality, mood fluctuations, stress levels.

This measurement focus serves commercial rather than healing purposes. It makes progress visible to justify continued subscription. It creates data that can be used for product optimization and customer retention.

But genuine healing often occurs through processes that resist quantification. The most profound transformations may not register on wellness metrics. The emphasis on measurement can actually interfere with natural healing processes.

Beyond the wellness trap

Recognizing wellness commercialization does not mean rejecting all healing approaches. It means distinguishing between practices designed to foster genuine resolution and those designed to create sustainable dependency.

Authentic healing practices typically:

• Aim for graduation rather than retention
• Address root causes rather than managing symptoms
• Develop internal capacity rather than external dependency
• Operate outside commercial optimization pressures

The question is not whether to seek healing, but how to identify approaches that serve healing rather than revenue optimization.

The value of genuine healing

Real healing creates independence, not dependency. It resolves problems rather than managing them. It develops internal resources rather than external requirements.

The commercialization of healing represents a profound value inversion: the transformation of human capacity for self-repair into market opportunities for others’ profit.

Understanding this inversion is the first step toward reclaiming healing as a natural human capacity rather than a commercial service category.

The wellness industry has successfully convinced us that healing is something we purchase rather than something we are capable of. This fundamental misattribution may be the deepest form of commodification: the sale of our own innate capacities back to us as products.