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Wellness culture has turned exercise into a personality, as young people trade in joy, spontaneity, and a social life for punishing self-optimisation.
We’re living through a fitness fever dream. Scroll any social feed and you’ll see it: a never-ending carousel of cold plunges and step counts. For many young people, the gym has become a temple where workouts are both religious rituals and social performances. We might be physically fitter than ever, but is our obsession with self-optimisation slowly killing a capacity for joy?
The rise of online wellness culture has made movement more aspirational, and algorithmically rewarded, than ever before.
On the surface this looks like young people prioritising their health and wellbeing during a period of profound instability (not only in the microcosmic sense that accompanies your early years beyond university, but also in the form of a post-pandemic world riddled with international conflict and political instability – what a cocktail. The rigidity and predictability of a gym sounds more appealing by the second).
But you need only dig a little deeper to find a wholly different narrative. One of loneliness, unhealthy obsession, and a retreat from the messy and meaningful details that make life what it is.
The pressure cooker that is social media has created a mounting tension between exercising to feel good about ourselves, and exercising to feel worthy – whether that’s of one’s own high expectations or the fear of outside judgement.
Fitness influencers routinely post about training multiple times a day, eschewing rest and recovery for gains or sporting PBs. Their routines are no longer just fitness regimes, but aspirational identities complete with their own moral undertones.
The black and white of it comes down to a close-minded attitude towards health and wellness, that sees an extreme approach to fitness as the only viable option – anything else is lazy and won’t get you the results you’re looking for.
But what are these results anyway? If we’ve stopped seeing movement as a means to feel alive and instead as a litmus test for self worth and self-induced struggle, then what’s the point of it all?
Sarah Manavis has observed how today’s wellness landscape has shifted away from communal movement towards hyper-individualistic pursuit. Group classes have made way for solo sessions fuelled by metrics and muscle definition. We train alone. We eat alone. We track alone. Ironically, in a time when we’ve never had more tools to connect, our bodies are being measured against strangers we follow but never meet.
It hasn’t always been this way, as Jill Hawkins pointed out in a 2019 blog post. ‘[My father’s] disappointment at the conversion of half of his local centre’s squash courts into spin studios is palpable,’ she wrote, discussing her father’s firm belief in the power of ‘social skill hobbies’ like hiking or swimming or dancing with others. ‘People just seem to want to exercise on their own these days…’ he told Hawkins with malaise.
