El síndrome del bienestar

Why is it that the harder you try to be happy, the worse you feel? Day after day, you wake up intending to eat healthily, meditate, exercise, and do your best at work. And yet, something is amiss. Instead of liberation, you feel guilt, anxiety, and that nagging suspicion that no matter how hard you try, you'll never be good enough. Perhaps you're a victim of the "wellness syndrome." In this incisive and good-humored essay, Carl Cederström and André Spicer unravel how the contemporary obsession with health, happiness, and personal performance has become a moral imperative. To do so, they follow perfect-diet fanatics, executives who start their day with athletic dances, obsessives who monitor everything (including how often they go to the bathroom), and self-help gurus for whom "feeling good" has become indistinguishable from "being good." The result is a world in which the hope for social change has been reduced to a set of dreams of individual transformation, political debate has been replaced by self-absorbed moralism, and scientific evidence has been supplanted by new age delusions.