The wellness industry has successfully monetized the act of sitting quietly. The premium version includes a guided audio track, a $40 candle, and a subscription to an app that reminds you to breathe. We are all complicit.
I'm not sure exactly when doing nothing became a product, but I think it was sometime around 2018, when the first wave of meditation apps hit critical mass and someone realized that the thing people were paying for was permission. Permission to stop. Permission to not be productive for twelve minutes. Permission to exist without optimizing.
The genius of this is that it takes the thing capitalism broke — the ability to rest without guilt — and sells it back to you as a solution to the problem capitalism created. You are stressed because you are always working. Here is a $15/month subscription to help you not work for twelve minutes a day. The twelve minutes of not-working will make you better at working. This is the pitch. It works.
The spoofdaily cultural commentary beat has been covering the wellness industry for a while, and the trajectory is consistent: every practice that was once free and informal becomes a product, then a premium product, then a luxury product. Meditation was free. Then it was an app. Then it was a retreat. Then it was a $3,000 silent retreat in the desert with a chef and a sound bath and a morning ceremony led by someone with a certification from an institution that didn't exist five years ago.
The latest iteration is "doing nothing" as a deliberate practice. Not meditation — that's too active. Not sleep — that's too passive. Doing nothing. Sitting. Being. The Japanese concept of ma — negative space, the pause between things — has been discovered by the wellness industry and is currently being packaged into a course.
The course costs $297. It includes a workbook about how to do nothing. The workbook has exercises. The exercises are things you do. To practice doing nothing.
The content culture angle on this is about the infinite regress of self-improvement content. Every solution to a problem created by self-improvement culture becomes another self-improvement product. You are burned out from optimizing. Here is an optimized approach to not optimizing. The optimization never ends. It just changes its name.
The cultural commentary tradition has a word for this: recuperation. The system takes the critique of the system and turns it into a product. The critique of busyness becomes a busyness about not being busy. The critique of optimization becomes an optimized approach to not optimizing.
I bought the candle. It smells like cedar and something called "quiet." I'm not sure what quiet smells like, but apparently it's $40. The candle is good. I'm not going to pretend the candle isn't good. But I'm also aware that I paid $40 for permission to sit in a room and smell something nice, and that the permission was the product, not the candle.
The culture conversation about this is ongoing. The wellness industry is not going anywhere. The products will get more expensive and more elaborate. The thing they're selling — permission to stop — will remain the same. We will keep buying it because the alternative is figuring out how to give ourselves permission for free, and that turns out to be the hardest thing of all.