Hello hello I'm back in Pakistan for the summer and can I please just say that when you are away from home for a long time all logic flies out of the window and you become an embarrassing romantic about your country despite your best efforts. Not that I am making many efforts in this regard. On the third day of Eid, my family and I got stuck on Seaview road and I gazed out of the window at the hundreds of people blasting music from their vehicles and running out into the sea as everyone else in the car tried to navigate our way out of there, grumbling about road blockage. In the West, life is neat and ordered and private. H and I have a nice little one-bedroom apartment where we work and study and write and read, but it is only when the edges of everything bleed into everything else that we remember what roots us, what our stake in this world is. Needless to say, that since I've been here, I feel quite honestly alive again.
Thinking about our stake in the world brings me to something else I've been wanting to write about for a long time and that is wellness and its related industries. Wellness is a relatively new term in our collective vocabularies. I think the first time I heard it was as a rejection of the diet culture/body shaming culture that pervaded most of my youth. When I was doing my A levels and even my undergraduate degree, many of us dieted - myself included. We cut carbs, warned each other not to eat too much fruit, some of us smoked as a way to kill our appetite, many of us were walking around with undiagnosed eating disorders. There was a lot of pressure to be desirable. There is still a lot of pressure to be desirable, but now it’s called something else. In the last, I wanna say five or six years there has been some sort of shift away from forced diets and exercise and towards this idea of wellness. So, what is wellness? Wellness is purportedly a holistic approach to the health of your body and mind. In Pakistan amongst a certain class of people it is no longer fashionable to be on a diet or to exercise in order to simply lose weight. Instead there are sound baths, yoga classes, kombucha, Ayurveda, eating mindfully, going to the farmer's market, movement as exercise. Not that I have an issue with any of these things in isolation, but the fact that this is the year we experienced the worst economic recession in recent memory and also the same year Karachi had its first wellness festival means that there is something happening here that requires further interrogation.
Let's turn our attention for a moment to the house and home of wellness, which is of course the USA. In America, wellness is the name of the game. Being well, taking care of yourself, treating your body right, putting yourSELF first - these are the underlying principles upon which many people build their lives. Not everyone can afford to shop at Whole Foods, but shopping at Whole Foods is definitely an aspiration. What do people talk about? buying organic, eating gluten free, juicing, cleansing, shopping small business, limiting social media, taking a pole class to reclaim your sexuality. So suddenly what you choose to spend your money on becomes akin to political action and that is a grave problem. Already the world has been bought out from under our feet. Land, water, air, fire, none of it is free and we must buy them in order to be able to survive. Now we can also buy back a false sense of agency by purchasing organically or ethically or mindfully. We have also created new markers of class via wellness – green juice, ‘sustainably made’ gym wear, skincare, clean girl aesthetic, eating just protein and greens for lunch (in this economy?!) So yeah, given the world we are living in today, it’s clear that the wellness industry cannot heal our profoundly sick societies. Wellness is the same as ethical consumption under capitalism by which I mean to say that it is a very well executed hoax. It’s no coincidence that as the world crumbles around us, more and more of us are being sold this idea of wellness.
What does it mean to be ‘well’ in the global South? In countries that first felt and will continue to feel the effects of climate change, industrial pollution, neo-imperialism? In countries that bought into the free market myth and are now struggling under the weight of unbelievable debt? Where the only way we are told we can progress is if we push for a narrow ambit of reforms by which everyone will get their ‘rights’? Whose bodies float above the throng? It may seem empowering to treat your body like a temple, but the fact remains that our bodies are not temples. We use them to navigate the world we live in. Maintaining the temple that is your body will lead you to isolating yourself from the world around you. And all for nothing. In the end, there is only so much you can do to distance yourself from a world that is slowly being destroyed. In truth we are only as well as the planet, we are only as well as the societies we have formed and participate in, we are only as well as each other.
Perhaps it is important to note that the people most in favor of wellness are often those who worked soul sucking corporate jobs with no work-life balance and got totally burnt out only to realize there is more to life than making money. They aren’t wrong, there is certainly more to life than making money, but often the people at the forefront of wellness industries are those whose critiques of capitalism, patriarchy, race, imperialism is limited. Wellness offers a limited critique of these things because it’s not enough to say you need work-life balance or that work is not your life or that you must treat yourself with compassion or that you don’t need to buy things to be happy. All these things are true, but our analysis of what is wrong with the world simply cannot end there. This is only the tip of the iceberg baby, and we have a long longgg way to go.
The fact is that I do not wish to be well. I wish to be free. Wellness is nothing but a shitty band aid fixed over a gaping wound. Okay, but I hear some of you saying, we’re not stupid. We know wellness can’t make us free. But we’ll never be able to afford buying a house so can’t we just eat our avocado toast if it makes us happy? Ya I mean, you can do what you want but let’s not forget there are more things in life than buying a house and/or eating avocado toast. We need to be more skeptical of lazy discourse, whether that discourse is defeatist or trying to sell us something that will set us free. Freedom is never bought, freedom is only built. I feel like we are at some kind of a crossroads, that this is an important time not just in the world but also in the history of this generation. In Pakistan we can make the choices our parents made and our attitude towards the wellness industries are part and parcel of this. We too can aspire to build grand houses in DHA, own multiple cars, extend our cities by wiping out villages and farmlands, and then spend even more money trying to heal and protect ourselves from the toxic environments that we have helped create.
What is becoming clearer with each passing year is that it’s only going to get more and more difficult and more and more costly to ignore these gaping wounds. At the same time, over the next few years, wellness is going to become a bigger industry here because, as we have seen in America, the widening poverty gap and a strategy to ignore it always go hand in hand. A healthy skepticism of wellness is integral as we move forward because wellness is not concerned with the health of our communities. Although some of wellness discourse uses the language of community and care, ultimately the wellness industry takes us further away from community and into the private sphere. A neat and ordered private life, a life where the self reigns supreme is what the supposedly unstoppable forces want us to work towards. But of course, there is more, so much more and we shall build it together.
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