“When the streets, the transportation, and the schools felt unsafe, trying to achieve mental peace became a form of security that many considered worth investing in, especially if it was simultaneously through cultivating beauty.” (On the rise of investment in yoga studies in New York after 9/11).
The post-lockdown existential discomfort has defined the generation that entered the pandemic as adolescents and came out having to face adulthood. When the outside world is perceived as a chaotic and threatening space, the need for control shifts inward: the body becomes a refuge, the routine a ritual, self-care a promise of security, and the illusion of well-being, a form of survival.
The Pink Pilates Princess wakes up early, meditates, and follows her skincare routine. She might have a matcha latte and an avocado toast, then put on her Lululemon outfit, grab her Stanley cup and Alo yoga mat, and head to her barre class before meeting her friends for brunch. Never imperfect, she will have her life in order and won’t feel lost, uncertain, or insufficient. She has manifested it so many times that it seems to have become true: the Pink Pilates Princess doesn’t realize that, having surrendered to everything that may give meaning to her emotions (crystals, burning sage, and even trusting the stars), she is no longer able to feel anything herself.
In a Barcelona of accelerated rhythms and poses that appear calm, wellness has become a multimillion-dollar industry that capitalizes on the human need for emotional security, transforming self-care into an aspirational product of late neoliberalism. In the age of well-being, feeling good is not just a desire, but an imperative. Mental health, promoted as an individual and individualistic responsibility, is managed through the constant consumption of imported, decontextualized, and depoliticized products and experiences. Freedom, turned into self-exploitation, deprives the contemporary body—always a project, and constantly optimizable—of the possibility of vulnerability.
In a narcissistic trap, happiness is measured by the aesthetic coherence of a meticulously curated lifestyle. The aestheticization of the everyday, characteristic of the society of the spectacle, appropriates practices once minority—many of them belonging to marginalized groups—and filters them through exclusive aesthetics that consolidate a new social code of distinction. The new leisure class is the one with the means to incorporate into their daily routine the tokens of the promise of transcendence, without the lack of resources (temporal or economic) suffocating them further.
But the generation that juggles three jobs to afford Erewhon stakes its identification as a balanced, radiant, and productive person… a performance standard and a psychopolitical control device that reveals the paradox of hyper-focusing on the self in order to feel belonging to a community; and starting with the superficial assimilation of values that are associated with certain principles, hoping they will eventually change you from within.
The fascination with a return to the ancestral coexists with its commercialization, in a sanctification of everyday totems custom-made by digital consumption patterns. Exotic retreats, moon baths, and energy therapies replace traditional faith dogmas, but they only update the most profoundly human impulse of ritualizing existence to find meaning in a progressively more dizzying earthly world.
Between irony and critical clarity, 🧚🏻♀️✨🎀🍵🫧💌 explores the new forms of mysticism that resonate with the longing for connection of the most interconnected generation in history, in a worldview of toxic positivities that only respond to structural loneliness and the anxiety of having lived in a state of permanent crisis.
With the body as the center of power—how else could it be in the image society?—visual identity is taken as the only territory we are truly capable of managing, embellishing, and optimizing; and aesthetic perfection is presented as an indicator of the presumed catharsis. Between health and personal branding, suffering is hidden under pastel filters and homogenized aesthetics, and the difference between self-care and self-destruction depends on how much you are willing to invest.
Are we all deserving of well-being? Does the promise of healing free us, or make us even more captive? And what does it really mean to be well? Perhaps this time, among halites, transitions, wishbones, fairy dust, and meditations on the city, we’ll hope the sun will show us the path.