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We are in a post-pandemic funk. Millions of people, often in well-paid jobs and well-organised societies, are disengaged and dissatisfied. Rates of mental health conditions among the young are at all-time highs.
Enter, then, a myriad of quick-fix solutions under the catch-all term “wellness”. This innocuous-looking word has spawned a global industry worth an estimated $1.8tn in 2024: spas, retreats and yoga holidays are booming, while every big employer has a “wellness programme” offering largely useless remedies: AI-based mental health support or lunchtime meditation.
But what is wellness? And how can we understand its benefits while jettisoning the charlatans and pointless interventions? I’ve struggled with defining what is valuable in this amorphous universe while taking part in activities that make a positive difference to my own mental and physical health: ice swimming, sound baths and breathwork sessions.
I found the answers — plus some fantastically weird anecdotes — in James Riley’s engrossing and timely book Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves.
Riley outlines his project early on: “There is much that this often misunderstood and maligned decade can teach us . . . about what it really means to be well. Terms like ‘wellness’, ‘wellbeing’ and ‘self-care’ have long histories . . . but they only really took root in the 1970s . . . Promising not just the absence of disease but a better, healthier and more fulfilled life, these methods, projects, diets and even cults offered an antidote to the strains of the modern world.”
What follows is a journey through the global development of wellness experiments, although predictably many take place in California. The wellness movement has its deepest roots in the postwar period and Riley highlights the work of “holistic”-focused health reformers such as Halbert L Dunn, who held senior roles in the US government. Dunn was one of the first to suggest that “social health should be more than a defensive battle against disease”. Not being ill is not enough — humans should be “alive with the glow of good health”. From this view of wellness, everything else in Riley’s book follows.
Well Beings traces a line from the radical politics and social change of the 1960s into the 1970s, when we stopped trying to change the world and instead looked to change ourselves. It was controversial at the time, with conservative commentators suggesting that taking care of the self was “an immorality”. But much of the wellness movement was aimed at improving the wider lot of humanity.
Riley examines the mixed fortunes of flotation therapy — a way to escape stress and reach a state of bliss by getting into a dark water-filled tank and entering a state of sensory deprivation that can be, as one innovator called it, “total consciousness . . . in tune with universal mind”. Flotation was big in California in the 1970s, but fell out of fashion — now, it’s coming back.
It is easy to trick the human mind into doing things that are against its best interests, as Riley shows. Some of the most compelling parts of the book outline the damaging extremes of the 1970s, among them the Est movement, founded by Werner Erhard.
Erhard was born John Paul Rosenberg, a car salesman who reinvented himself as the founder of Erhard Seminars Training. Est sessions took place in hotel conference rooms, and aimed to break down the barriers preventing participants from reaching their personal goals. What it really amounted to, as Riley remarks, was “a virtually non-stop 32-hour marathon” in which coaches berated attendees “into airing their perceived problems in front of the hundred or so other sleep-deprived, caffeine-starved, bathroom-needing participants”.
Riley is an academic at the University of Cambridge and an expert in the counter cultures of the 20th century — his previous book was The Bad Trip (2019). In Well Beings, he reanimates the mood of the 1970s with a range of contemporary cultural resources from books, philosophy, politics, even popular British sitcoms of the time.
We finish at the start of the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are in power, greed is good and social conformity prevails. Since then, it’s taken us far too long to re-enlighten ourselves, and remember, as Riley points out, that: “Money could buy you anything. Except happiness, of course, and a secure sense of wellbeing.”
Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves by James Riley, Icon £25, 480 pages
Isabel Berwick is host of the FT’s ‘Working It’ podcast and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’
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