What Chaos and Deviance Reveal: Young People's "Wellness Fatigue"
According to Lululemon’s 2024 Global Wellbeing Report, young people in developed countries are experiencing “wellness fatigue”—a phenomenon where excessive efforts to maintain physical, mental, and social well-being are ironically increasing stress and exhaustion.
Wellness aims to promote a fulfilling lifestyle rooted in holistic health, encompassing aspects like purpose and dignity. However, with an overwhelming amount of information and business activity around wellness, many are feeling lost, caught in a cycle that ultimately leads to burnout.
There are calls to “be kind to oneself” as a remedy for wellness fatigue, yet such advice often rings hollow. Instead, this fatigue seems linked to the popularity of entertainment that might appear to defy wellness ideals, such as horror films, axe-throwing bars, and ultra-spicy foods. These forms of entertainment hint at a primal desire to reclaim parts of ourselves neglected by orderly, health-focused ideals—a desire to reconnect with chaos and deviance.
Artists in the past have explored this issue in extreme ways. Salvador Dalí’s surrealism aimed to restore humanity by bringing the unconscious to the surface, while Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty sought to rekindle a sense of life through shock and disturbance. The enduring appreciation for these works suggests that true, deep satisfaction may not lie solely in a state of rational calm but rather in the gritty struggle to push past limits.
As AI and other technologies continue to streamline and optimize much of life, a forward-looking perspective on wellness would benefit from contemplating a society where disorder, deviance, contradiction, and imperfection are embraced as part of the human experience. Idealized wellness may indeed be appealing, but new art will likely emerge from those overlooked human elements left behind.
Original Article in Japanese for Nihon Keizai Shimbun: