Optimized to death
Wellness promised liberation. It gave us surveillance, shame, and supplements.
Over the past two decades, wellness has transformed from a niche pursuit into a dominant cultural force. Once confined to alternative health circles and New Age retreats, it has now permeated mainstream consumer culture, shaping how people eat, exercise, work, and even think about their own mortality. Wellness brands, ranging from luxury health stores to biotech-driven supplement companies, have become arbiters of this movement, selling not just products but an entire lifestyle that promises self-optimization, longevity, and transcendence.
The modern wellness industry presents itself as a utopian project at its core. It offers a vision of a body and mind free from toxins, disease, and dysfunction. A world where individuals, through careful discipline and the right set of products, can unlock their fullest potential. This is not simply about health; it is about transformation. Wellness brands trade in the promise of purity, extending beyond physical well-being into moral and even spiritual realms.
Yet beneath this idealistic exterior lies a set of hidden tensions. The wellness industry is not merely about self-improvement but also about control. Control over the body, over nature, and over the forces of aging and mortality. It constructs an aspirational but ultimately exclusionary world, where only those with the means, knowledge, and discipline can fully participate. This creates an implicit hierarchy, with the “optimized” at the top and those who struggle to adhere to wellness ideals subtly positioned as lesser, a fundamentally classist distinction.
Furthermore, wellness branding commodifies not just health but morality itself. Clean eating becomes a marker of virtue, biohacking a test of personal worthiness, and anti-aging a battle against the inevitability of time. Brands capitalize on this by offering solutions to increasingly abstract problems—whether it’s “chronic inflammation,” “gut imbalance,” or “low energy.” The rhetoric of optimization feeds an endless cycle of aspiration and inadequacy, ensuring that the pursuit of wellness is never truly complete.
By placing modern wellness culture in historical context, we can better understand how these anxieties have surfaced before—and how brands might break free from reinforcing them.
The aesthetic of purity
The visual language of wellness is unmistakable: soft neutrals, clean typography, and minimalist packaging dominate the industry. It’s not just modern. It’s moral. In the world of wellness branding, simplicity connotes purity, and purity is equated with goodness. The obsession with “clean” beauty, “clean” eating, and “clean” living suggests that anything outside these boundaries is inherently contaminated.
This aesthetic draws heavily from religious asceticism. In many spiritual traditions, purity is linked to restraint. Practices like fasting, abstinence, are ultimately the rejection of excess. Wellness brands echo this lineage, often positioning indulgence as a form of self-sabotage. But the paradox within is that these are shrouded in the all-too-Western mode of overconsumption. The implication is clear: to be well is to be in control, to resist cravings, to maintain discipline. High-end wellness stores and supplement brands turn something as simple as a smoothie into a ritual of purification, with hyper-curated ingredients designed to cleanse the body of unseen impurities.
The aesthetic of purity also reinforces an implicit demonization of excess, indulgence, and imperfection. Processed foods, bright artificial colors, and chaotic designs are coded as impure, unhealthy, and even sinful. The rise of brands that promise “clean beauty” and “non-toxic living” implies that anything outside of these carefully curated aesthetics is dangerous. The rejection of excess mirrors larger societal anxieties about modernity, capitalism, and environmental degradation, repackaging these fears into personal responsibility.
The language of purity also extends to the body itself. Wellness culture often portrays an idealized, unblemished body as the ultimate goal. A body free from acne, wrinkles, or signs of fatigue. This aesthetic reinforces the idea that true wellness is visually discernible and that to appear ‘unwell’ is to fail at self-care. The pressure to maintain a pristine, youthful appearance is not just about aesthetics but about maintaining one’s place in the moral hierarchy of wellness.
The aesthetic of purity, then, is not just about health. It is about social signaling. Those who can afford organic, biodynamic, and adaptogenic products demonstrate their status not just through wealth but through their ability to discipline their consumption. Wellness brands do not just sell products; they sell a new kind of moral hierarchy.
Luxury wellness brands often merge clinical minimalism with mystical undertones, positioning their products as both scientifically advanced and spiritually enlightened. Their powdered supplements and longevity elixirs imply that the unoptimized mind and body are deficient, and only through disciplined adherence to the right regimen can one achieve enlightenment. Here, wellness is not just a lifestyle but a moral imperative.
In this context, wellness brands do more than sell health; they sell an ideology. They reinforce a vision of the world in which purity equals worth, excess equals failure, and the pursuit of optimization is never-ending. This aesthetic of purity is not just about design—it is a form of social stratification, drawing boundaries between the “clean” and the “unclean,” the optimized and the unoptimized.
I’m releasing Optimized to Death as a limited drop because I wanted to experiment with friction. Some ideas shouldn’t be flattened into a scroll. This piece started as a critique of wellness branding and became something denser—a look at how health got wrapped up in control, virtue, and status. I wrote it from a place of exhaustion, with the pressure to optimize everything, all the time. But make no mistake, I love a matcha and going to the sauna too.
Thanks for reading with care.
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Thank you to all my friends who have read this essay and helped shape it, especially , , and Elliot Vredenburg.
Loved this piece!
I never thought about the control aspect, this is going to cause a lot of introspection.