The Wellness Syndrome

Can pursuing health and happiness ever go too far? In The Wellness Syndrome, Carl Cederström and André Spicer argue that society has turned wellness—a once personal and optional pursuit—into a moral command. What began as a sincere desire to live healthily has transformed into an ideology shaping how we think, work, eat, and relate to others. The authors show that under today’s cultural obsession with fitness, mindfulness, and positivity, the promise of wellness actually produces anxiety, guilt, and self-absorption, leaving us lonelier and less free.

Rather than simply promoting good habits, the wellness movement now imposes an unspoken expectation: to be healthy is to be good; to feel bad is to be a failure. Borrowing from philosopher Alenka Zupančič, Cederström and Spicer term this mindset biomorality, a moral system that equates physical and mental health with virtue. In modern workplaces, in life coaching, in dieting, and even in self-help books, wellness has become a yardstick for ethics and personal success. And behind this moral turn lies what Slavoj Žižek calls the superego injunction to enjoy—a social pressure to always strive for pleasure, productivity, and positivity, even when such command inevitably erodes genuine happiness.

From Self-Improvement to Self-Surveillance

Cederström and Spicer trace how an ancient quest for balance has been hijacked by contemporary capitalism. Today, self-care is less about personal flourishing and more about compliance. We track steps, log calories, download mindfulness apps, and attend corporate wellness programs—not just to feel better but to perform better. The body becomes a site of moral discipline and economic optimization. We are asked to take responsibility for every aspect of our health, success, and happiness, turning life into an endless project of self-surveillance. Even sickness, insecurity, or unemployment become personal failures, not structural or social issues.

The Ideology of Choice and Responsibility

This ideology thrives on the illusion of choice: you can always choose to be healthy, happy, and successful. But that freedom carries a hidden burden. As sociologist Renata Salecl writes (quoted here), choice generates guilt and anxiety because every decision seems ultimately your fault. Under the wellness regime, your body is a personal business enterprise and your emotions an investment to be managed. Fail to achieve balance or positivity, and you are guilty of poor self-management.

Why Wellness Feels So Good—and So Impossible

Cederström and Spicer’s diagnosis resonates precisely because it exposes the seductive side of wellness. Eating clean, meditating, or following inspirational gurus can feel morally satisfying. Yet these practices often reinforce the same capitalist logic they claim to resist. Whether you sign a “wellness contract” at a university or track your mood at work, you are internalizing discipline that once came from external institutions. In replacing politics with personal optimization, we lose sight of collective responsibility. “Wellness,” the authors write, has wormed itself into every aspect of life—from prison programs teaching mindfulness to corporate teams singing motivational songs. It shapes workers, consumers, and even patients into self-blaming subjects who must continually prove their worth through health and happiness.

Why This Matters

The wellness syndrome is more than a cultural fad; it reflects a deep transformation in how societies govern people. Whereas religion once told us to renounce sin, now wellness tells us to renounce unhealthy habits. Corporations, governments, and media have joined forces to moralize body and emotion. This shift leaves little room for imperfection or political dissent: the unhappy, the unfit, and the unwell are treated not only as failures but as threats. Cederström and Spicer show that escaping the wellness trap means reclaiming the right to weakness, doubt, and even sickness. Only by giving up the fantasy of perfect health and limitless potential can we begin to rediscover genuine human freedom and connection.

Why do those who preach happiness often seem the most unhappy? The book opens with the haunting story of Lynne Rosen and John Littig, two life coaches who hosted a radio show called The Pursuit of Happiness. Their teachings centered on positive change and inner growth—yet they both died in a double suicide. This tragedy sets the stage for the authors’ critique of today’s self-help culture, where life coaching has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry built on vague promises like “unlock your potential.” Though coaching appears empowering, Cederström and Spicer reveal its darker side: it outsources our most intimate struggles to paid experts while internalizing blame for every failure.

Outsourcing Intimacy

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild is cited to describe how coaching has turned our emotional lives into outsourced services. Instead of sharing doubts with friends or family, people hire professionals to manage their feelings, goals, and even desires. There are coaches for jobs, relationships, and even “wantologists” to help decide what you want. This extends capitalist expertise into the most private corners of life. Ironically, the more anxious and time-strapped we become, the more we depend on coaches—requiring extra income to pay them, which drives the cycle of overwork.

Insourcing Blame

While coaching seems collaborative, it quietly shifts all responsibility to the individual. The coach may say, “You are already whole, capable, and creative,” yet the subtext is: if you’re unhappy, it’s your fault. Sociologist Renata Salecl calls this the “tyranny of choice.” The absence of external authority doesn’t liberate the individual; it multiplies anxiety. Coaching demands perpetual introspection—what Slavoj Žižek calls a “ferocious superego” urging you to do more, be better, enjoy more. The old father figure disappears, only to be replaced by an invisible voice inside your head commanding self-improvement without end.

The Narcissistic Spiral

Drawing on Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, the authors show how coaching feeds self-fascination rather than empathy. In this world, relationships exist merely as mirrors for self-enhancement. Feedback becomes fodder for self-analysis, not connection. Like Žižek’s “injunction to enjoy,” the command to self-optimize never satisfies; it breeds guilt and frustration. The more earnestly individuals pursue happiness, the more punitive their inner judge becomes. This superego doesn’t prohibit enjoyment—it demands it, then mocks you for failing to enjoy enough.

In the end, coaching epitomizes the wellness syndrome: it transforms existential uncertainty into marketable anxiety. Each session promises to reveal your “authentic self,” yet that self is always just out of reach, forcing you to buy another consultation, app, or retreat. Cederström and Spicer urge readers to see this not as personal weakness but as a political condition—a culture where self-improvement replaces solidarity, and guilt masquerades as growth.

Cederström and Spicer situate wellness within what sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the “new spirit of capitalism.” In past decades, work promised security and routine; today, it promises creativity, authenticity, and flexibility. Comparing John Brack’s 1955 painting Collins St, 5 p.m.—with its rows of grey bureaucrats—to modern ads for “the wo/man of now,” the authors illustrate how the worker has evolved from the faceless conformist of Fordism to a performance-obsessed self-branding individual. The ideal human of contemporary capitalism is perpetually agile: tweeting, posting, working out, meditating, and networking—all while smiling.

From Fordism to Flexibility

In Fordist capitalism, stability and collective belonging mattered most. Workers traded creativity for security. With the social unrest of the 1960s, activists demanded authenticity, meaning, and self-expression. Capitalism absorbed those critiques and reinvented itself, promising “liberation management,” team creativity, and visionary leadership. Now companies like Google and Zappos ask applicants not “Can you do the job?” but “How weird are you?”—seeking workers who are not only efficient but “authentically themselves.”

Precarity and Performance

Yet beneath the rhetoric of freedom lies growing insecurity. Ivor Southwood’s Non-Stop Inertia, cited by the authors, portrays workers terrified of job loss yet forced to appear cheerful. Zero-hour contracts and “flexible” arrangements fuel anxiety while demanding constant self-promotion. Temporary jobs are sold as opportunities for “choice” even though they erase stability. The ideal employee becomes a self-managed corporation of one—upbeat, adaptable, and perpetually available.

The Tyranny of Choice

Salecl’s insight that choice produces panic resurfaces here. With a thousand career pivots, diets, and mindfulness regimens to choose from, individuals live in permanent anxiety about choosing wrong. This “whitespace” of choice blurs freedom with fear. The “wo/man of now” embodies it perfectly: confident yet panicked, networking furiously while dreading collapse. Wellness thus fits seamlessly into capitalism’s demands—it promises stability amid chaos but actually normalizes insecurity as “the nature of things.”

For Cederström and Spicer, the pursuit of wellness is not rebellion against capitalism—it’s its emotional lubricant. Even mindfulness training at corporations like Google or the U.S. Marine Corps teaches focus and calm, not liberation. The employee learns to adapt to stress, not question it. In this sense, the new spirit of capitalism feeds on the wellness syndrome, turning our desire for inner peace into fuel for perpetual productivity.

Mindfulness may look harmless—after all, who could object to breathing calmly? But Cederström and Spicer reveal how it has become a corporate tool that turns stress into personal responsibility. At Google, the most popular course is called Search Inside Yourself, founded by Chade-Meng Tan, a software engineer who became the company’s “Jolly Good Fellow.” Tan teaches employees that happiness and productivity come from mindful breathing and emotional awareness. Participants learn that “sustainable happiness” arises simply by paying attention to breath.

Mindfulness Goes Corporate

What began as a Buddhist spiritual practice has morphed into an industry of apps, conferences (like Wisdom 2.0), and workplace programs. Even the U.S. Marine Corps trains soldiers in “mind fitness” through meditation exercises before battle simulations. Mindfulness thus becomes a strange mix of neuroscience, spiritualism, and business coaching. While advocates cite scientific evidence, most claims are exaggerated or anecdotal (echoing Ben Goldacre’s critique in Bad Science). It’s not the proof that matters, say Cederström and Spicer—it’s the aura of science that makes mindfulness feel credible.

Stress as Choice

Critics like Ron Purser and David Loy argue that corporate mindfulness shifts the burden of stress from workplaces to individuals: if you’re anxious, don’t question your toxic environment—fix your mind. Stress becomes a personal flaw, not a systemic problem. This mindset fits perfectly into neoliberal logic: you are the problem, you are the solution, and breathing is your performance enhancer. Companies praise fluidity, impermanence, and adaptability, turning Buddhist notions of change into justifications for constant restructuring.

Listening to the Body as Truth System

The authors quote Hervé Juvin’s idea of the body as a “truth system.” When all external stability—institutions, relationships, social norms—has eroded, only bodily sensations seem reliable. Hence, we’re told to “listen to our bodies” for guidance. But this inward focus breeds paranoia and fragility: any disturbance—smoking, stress, or fatigue—becomes moral crisis. Mindfulness turns inward attention into obedience, teaching people to endure instability rather than challenge its cause. Cederström and Spicer conclude: under the wellness syndrome, the body replaces reason and politics as the last authority we trust—and that’s not liberation, but quiet submission.

One of the sharpest sections of The Wellness Syndrome tackles how health has become moralized—what the authors, echoing Alenka Zupančič, call biomorality. Smoking bans, fitness culture, and dietary obsession no longer concern mere wellbeing; they serve as moral boundaries between good and bad citizens. When American hospitals began refusing to hire smokers—even those who smoked off-site—Cederström and Spicer use this to show how wellbeing now regulates virtue. Smokers ceased to be people with unhealthy habits; they became sinners, unfit for respectable employment.

From Medicine to Morality

The authors remind us that Nazi Germany was the first state to ban smoking and link it to moral decay—a chilling precedent. Modern bans cloak moralism in scientific concern: they claim to protect public health while stigmatizing individuals. As Chantal Mouffe observes, politics now operates “in the moral register”: instead of debating justice, we condemn behaviors like smoking or overeating as evil. Through this lens, wellness becomes a depoliticized ethics where being healthy equals being good.

Guilt as Governance

Renata Salecl describes how health care increasingly treats patients not with authority but by outsourcing decision-making back to them. Choice replaces expertise, so any bad outcome (sickness, obesity) becomes the patient’s fault. Health thus becomes the “individual’s ultimate sin.” You can see this mechanism everywhere—from fitness trackers to workplace wellness programs—each reinforcing guilt for failing to self-manage perfectly.

Private Lives, Public Judgments

Cederström and Spicer argue that this moral gaze has reached deep into private life. Politicians and celebrities are judged not by policy but diet, exercise, and sex life. Moralization of lifestyle replaces public debate. Creating a better world shifts from collective decisions to personal habits—“health and happiness” become moral watchwords, while structural inequality remains unaddressed. In short, we traded the body politic for the body personal. Biomorality transforms social discontent into self-management, ensuring that the wellness syndrome persists as a perfectly moral form of control.

This insight synthesizes the book’s warning: in worshipping health and happiness, modern society has replaced ethics with metabolism. We now judge others—and ourselves—through metrics of diet, fitness, and positivity, believing that moral virtue lives in the mirror’s reflection.

In an era when happiness has become a policy goal, Cederström and Spicer explore how positive psychology reinforces the wellness syndrome. They trace this lineage from Norman Vincent Peale’s mid-century bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking to Martin Seligman’s scientifically branded “Authentic Happiness.” Both promise that a cheerful attitude is the key to success—but beneath the smiles lies a harsh insistence on self-blame: if you’re miserable, it’s your fault for not thinking positively enough.

From Religion to Science

Peale’s evangelical optimism transformed Calvinist guilt into motivational energy. Seligman repackaged that spiritual tradition as academic psychology, using equations like “H = S + C + V” (happiness equals set range, circumstances, and voluntary factors). As Barbara Ehrenreich found when confronting him, the science is questionable—what matters is the symbolic authority of science itself. Positive psychology legitimizes the duty to be happy with empirical jargon, justifying policies and workplace incentives aimed at emotional control.

When Governments Go Happy

The authors recount how British Prime Minister David Cameron consulted Seligman before launching a national “happiness index.” Amid austerity and social unrest, Cameron used happiness metrics to shift attention from welfare cuts to personal attitude. Being happy became civic duty; economic hardship was redefined as emotional failure. This echoes Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, which claims the rich attract wealth through positive thinking while the poor merely lack mental discipline—a cruel ideology disguised as empowerment.

The Cruel Optimism of Wellbeing

Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” Cederström and Spicer show how happiness becomes a trap. The pursuit of positivity blinds us to structural causes of distress. When even governments measure “national wellbeing,” unhappiness stops being a political issue—it’s a personal malfunction. Whether through life coaching, corporate seminars, or policy surveys, happiness becomes the new moral yardstick of citizenship. We stop asking “How do we change the world?” and start asking “How do I smile through it?” And that, the authors argue, is the wellness syndrome’s most pervasive deceit.

Can we ever break free from the command to be healthy and happy? In their conclusion, Cederström and Spicer propose a radical alternative: reclaiming imperfection and accepting human impotence. They contrast the endless pursuit of “measured pleasure”—seen in mindfulness clubs like London’s Morning Glory, where sober professionals rave before work—with the raw ecstasy Zadie Smith describes in her essay “Joy.” True joy, Smith writes, is fleeting, terrifying, and unmanageable—precisely what the wellness culture denies.

Measured Pleasures vs. Joy

The wellness regime offers controlled pleasure—sugar-free, stress-free, safe. Joy, by contrast, involves risk and surrender. At Morning Glory, workers dance soberly before their shifts, combining exercise with productivity. Their pleasure is optimized, not liberated. In chasing “healthy happiness,” they’ve lost the spontaneous intensity that makes life meaningful.

Rediscovering Impotence

Throughout the book, the authors remind us that human life is defined as much by weakness as by potential. Accepting impotence—the capacity to fail, to doubt, to hurt—is not defeat but freedom. Against the constant command to “fix yourself,” they suggest embracing incompleteness. Ivan Illich’s provocative motto “To hell with health” sums it up: illness, sadness, and exhaustion can be forms of resistance, spaces of rest from the endless labor of self-optimization.

From Private Wellness to Public Care

Escaping the wellness syndrome requires shifting focus outward—from self-care to collective care. Instead of measuring happiness or tracking heart rates, we might address injustice, inequality, and the “sickness of the world.” Cederström and Spicer envision a society where people need not prove moral worth through their physiques or mindsets. Wellness should serve life, not enslave it. Their final message is sobering yet hopeful: the cure to the wellness syndrome isn’t found in more health, but in rediscovering humanity beyond perfection.