Individual Wellness Culture is Destroying Us

Single tree in clearcut in fog - Austria by John Fabian

You may be wondering why I would send out an email with that title when I have said multiple times on this newsletter that individual healing is our collective responsibility. Surely that means individual wellness is an important component of community wellness. I do believe that is true! However I think that is distinct from the individual wellness culture (IWC), popularised by social media that is currently en vogue.

This IWC encourages to prioritise our own personal well-being at the expense of everything and everything else. It pushes the idea that we should always be entitled to emotional safety, which it seems to interpret has never feeling bad or uncomfortable. It asks us to think about our rights and feelings but never our actions and responsibilities. It is also part of the hyper-individualist capitalist landscape that we live in, that it asks us to believe wellness is something you can attain through consumption. This attitude to wellness continues the colonial capitalist project of eroding the bonds between people, which fundamentally, over time destroys communities of care and action.

Why? IWC sells us a fantasy of happiness. It lets us believe that if we purchase the right things, and religiously defend our peace from any kind of disruption we will be able to have lives of uninterrupted happiness and joy. This makes us believe that anyone or anything that disrupts our peace, is contributing to our ‘unwellness’ this means that we are entitled to, avoid, ignore or remove it from our lives. It lets us believe that anything or anyone that causes us to feel guilt or shame is damaging us and it is our duty in the pursuit of our wellness to exit from situations or relationships where this is the case.

Sadly, this fantasy is just that, a fantasy. Endless happiness or joy cannot be the goal of our lives because it is not possible. Life is full of struggles and challenges, no matter what we do, because life is complex. We are never in control of all of the variables, and IWC as it stands is not equipping us to be able to adequately rise to the challenges of life because IWC urges us to prioritise our own feelings at all costs. However, doing this doesn’t actually make us feel better overall or in the long term.

Therefore when I am talking about individual healing being our collective responsibility, I am talking about something entirely different. I am talking about realising that in any given situation or relationship, the only element that I have direct control over is myself, and therefore it is important to be able to have good communication skils, good emotional regulation skills, good boundaries etc… in order to be able to have good relationships which are then the backbone of healthy communities.

When I was a teenager I was a volunteer telephone counsellor and one of my mentors once said to me “no one can make you feel anything.” It took me many years to understand the truth of this. At the time, as a highly volatile teenager, it just felt like it was giving other people an out for the harm that they cause, and I immediately rejected it. It has taken me many years to truly grasp what he meant, and it still feels tricky to write about with enough nuance. At the end of the day we get to decide what our responses to difficult situations are, because ourselves are the only thing we have control of. Does it serve me to get reall angry when people are driving badly around me? Not really, so I choose the path of patience, I acknowledge the annoyance and move on. When I think about the fact no one can make me feel anything, it helps me step back and recognise what my role in any given situation is. How am I contributing to the dynamic at play?

I think the antitidote to IWC is to think more carefully about what our responsibilities are, this includes our responsiblities to ourselves but also to others. For me, when I think about what my responsiblities in the world are, to be a caring friend, a good partner, a good neighbour. It makes me think about what are the values I want to practice and how do I put these into action. I can’t be a good partner if I am really defensive all the time, because it would mean we can never have conversations about things that bother us. I can’t be a good friend if I am only ever seeing things from my own point of view, it is my responsibility to my friends to be able to cultivate seeing things through their eyes as well so that we can have balanced relationships.

I guess in summary what I am trying to say is that IWC makes us really focus on how other people are treating us when I think the emphasis should be the other way around. Our focus should be on how we are treating both others and ourselves.