Healthy and Quality Life Stream Turning into an Obsession While It Should Serve a Good Purpose: Wellness

In modern life, almost every trend can become ‘fashion’ and become universal. Many activities that are born with positive aims, such as facilitating and improving human life and serving it, are made harmful by societies that use these activities to eliminate their loneliness and unhappiness and obsess over this orientation.

The concept of “wellness” is one of these movements that started innocently and gradually deviated from its purpose.

Along with all the scientific and technological developments, the 21st century has given humanity another gift that will completely change our mental structure: individuality.

Especially in European culture, individuality, which found more solid foundations and developed, became a global basis and turned into an unquestionable reality. Actions that liberate us, such as being alone, making your own decisions, acting as you please, discovering yourself and your life purpose, are the outcomes of individuality.

After a point, some people who are trying to direct their lives, looking for meaning, wanting to get out of the emptiness they are in and cannot find what they wish in philosophy and thought actions, have turned to one of the basic rules that individualization tells them:

“You are the most important and most valuable thing in life.”

People who devote all their energies to themselves have made positive returns such as healthy body and mind, quality life, and well-being their philosophy of life. But what they didn’t know was that the only thing that profited from this was not their own body or mind, but the capitalist system as usual.

Middle-class members, struggling to make ends meet by the end of the month, began to view the avocados they paid for breakfast as a necessity, not a luxury, despite hating the taste.

Eating bread was considered unacceptable and extremely unhealthy. It was necessary to walk 2 kilometers every morning, to go to an expensive yoga class in the latest sports clothes.

Despite the unnecessary money to be spent, they were seen as necessities. A huge plate of salad for lunch should have been reluctantly eaten after a cool photo was taken to post on Instagram.

As a snack, money was poured into the latest exotic dried herbs and, according to the media, snacks that “prevent cancer”, “rejuvenate 30 years” and “grows hair”. Coming to age 40 meant getting old, this was unacceptable, and intervention was necessary; thousands of pounds of “anti-wrinkle creams” have become a necessity.

Those who do not fulfill all these obligatory rituals; People who eat fruits and vegetables grown in our country, walk on the beach instead of going to the gym, don’t need a life coach, find it normal to feel bad once in a while, and sometimes don’t want to put on make-up or dress up were considered irresponsible, depressed, neglected and unhappy.

Behind all this drama lies a chronic anxiety that has permeated us in the last century: the fear of getting sick.

The need to be immortal, to take root, which directs all the instincts of humanity, has been shaken by the unhealthy environment and the possibilities of disease brought by the modern world.

People who have lived an average of 30-40 years for centuries can live up to 85-90 years thanks to scientific developments, discovered treatments, and medicines.

This tells our subconscious: We can do more. Why settle for just 90 years when we can be immortal, never get sick, and never get weak?

What it took to achieve this was simple. The human body is becoming more invincible, healthy, unshakable, and robust.

We are constantly exposed to images of fitness, health, and power on social media, combined with food, medicine, and all the other products that can provide us with this body.

Social media and capitalism have joined forces to create an impossible ‘superhuman’. However, this meaningless effort was one of the factors that consumed the human mind the most and deeply.

People who are obsessed with wellness, in other words, are prone to see their lives as worthless and inadequate every day, to want more, and most importantly, to impair their health by projecting these obsessions on others.

Moreover, since this obsession is accepted as a harmless, healthy living habit by the person and his/her environment, it causes the person’s condition to worsen by constantly postponing the diagnosis and treatment.