Chapter 4
The Body as Battleground: Work, Weight, and Moral Worth
Investment bankers working 120-hour weeks reveal our culture's dysfunctional relationship with the body. Initially, they try to overcome bodily limitations, treating their flesh as an enemy to productivity. By year four, their bodies "fight back" with rage episodes and injuries, until survivors learn to treat their bodies as "trusted friends." This pattern extends beyond finance into medicine, law, and even routine service jobs where workers deny basic needs like sleep.
The corporate world has responded by reframing executives as "corporate athletes" who need training regimes to achieve "ideal performance states." Over half of large US employers now offer wellness programs, spending $6 billion annually on initiatives from diet counseling to on-site gyms. These programs blur work-leisure boundaries with innovations like walking meetings, treadmill desks, and bicycle workstations.
At Swedish truck manufacturer Scania, the "24-hour employee" concept extends corporate control beyond working hours under the guise of care. Their extensive wellness apparatus includes fitness facilities, lunch walks, and invasive "health talks" where employees answer questions about eating habits, exercise routines, and even loneliness. Many employees embrace these programs as unemployment insurance-staying fit makes them attractive to employers during uncertain times. The Protestant work ethic has been replaced by the work-out ethic, where exercising has become the price of entry to continued employment.
Dieting culture intertwines guilt with pleasure in complex ways. Many dieters like Kate Harrison seek relief from guilt through regimens like the 5:2 diet, hoping that fasting will free them from the "comfort eating and guilt cycle." However, as Zygmunt Bauman observes, dieting often intensifies rather than alleviates guilt. Studies confirm this paradox-33% of dietary program participants report feeling more guilty afterward, with dieters experiencing higher guilt levels than the general population.
The wellness syndrome has found its perfect foil in the figure of the "chav"-a derogatory British term for working-class people portrayed as undisciplined, unhealthy, and morally deficient. Reality television shows routinely depict working-class women as "beyond governance"-excessively loud, drunk, and having lost control over their bodies. The proliferation of "fat programs" ostensibly offer dietary interventions, but actually serve to "expose working-class families, especially mothers, as incapable of knowing how to look after themselves." These representations provide middle-class viewers with a spectacle of "subjectivity turned sour" and "an epidemic of the will."
Chapter 5
Food as Moral Intervention: The Celebrity Chef as Social Reformer
Jamie Oliver's transformation of food into a moral intervention designed to correct social and personal ills pioneered the now-widespread belief that eating well makes you morally good-even against your will. His groundbreaking show "Jamie's School Dinners" exemplified this approach by attempting to reform children in a deprived school by changing their canteen food, replacing "Turkey Twizzlers" with vegetable bakes.
Despite resistance from cafeteria staff, children, and parents, Oliver persevered, eventually mobilizing 250,000 citizens to petition for better school food. This led to concrete policy changes: certain foods were banned, and the government established a 60 million pound School Food Trust. Oliver continued his "food revolution" in follow-up shows, confronting resistance in places like Rotherham-the UK's "obesity capital." After meeting a single mother with a fridge full of junk food, he despaired: "I've been to Soweto and I've seen AIDS orphans eating better than this."
What's striking about Oliver's crusade isn't just his establishment of a "biomoral panopticon" where dietary failures are broadcast to millions, but the audacious assumption that serious social policy issues can be addressed through dietary intervention. The fate of disadvantaged children is framed not as determined by education policy, class structures, unemployment, or capitalism, but by what they eat. The Turkey Twizzler becomes disgusting not merely for its content but because it symbolizes all forms of discrimination and injustice visited upon these children.
This approach resonates because it suggests political interventions are only acceptable when they avoid broader issues and focus on narrow behavioral changes. Questions about government services, industry policy, or class systems are replaced by menu changes and cooking classes. This allows middle-class activists to feel they've done something worthy while leaving more fundamental political issues untouched-the essence of biomorality, providing a sense of smug righteousness while believing that if only everyone were more like you, the world would be both happier and healthier.
Chapter 6
The Science of Happiness: When Positivity Becomes Mandatory
Martin Seligman, the self-proclaimed high priest of positive psychology, rejects Freudian modesty and the goal of merely turning "hysterical misery into common unhappiness." Instead, he advocates moving from "plus two to plus seven in your life," viewing happiness as something that can be amplified like a hi-fi system if you simply "put your mind to it."
Positive psychology has deeper historical roots in American culture. Barbara Ehrenreich traces it back to Calvinism-a religion emphasizing self-examination that she describes as "socially imposed depression." As American conditions improved in the mid-1800s, the New Thought movement emerged, presenting humans as divine creatures with infinitely powerful minds. This movement preserved Calvinism's judgmentalism while adding magical thinking: combining the belief that you can achieve anything with a positive attitude alongside harsh personal responsibility (if you fail, it's your fault).
Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 bestseller "The Power of Positive Thinking" brought these ideas to the masses, particularly appealing to struggling salesmen needing confidence boosts. While Seligman distances himself from Peale's "cheap" approach, claiming his own method is scientifically based, both share the fundamental belief that happiness (and success) is ultimately an individual choice.
When journalist Barbara Ehrenreich questioned the scientific basis of Seligman's work, particularly his happiness equation (H = S + C + V), she found him evasive. When pressed about the units of measurement, Seligman reluctantly admitted that components like "C" would "decompose into twenty different things, like religion and marriage," revealing the shaky empirical foundation of his supposedly scientific approach.
Despite these weaknesses, positive psychology has successfully established itself as a legitimate academic discipline, attracting funding, entering university curriculums, and spawning its own Journal of Happiness Studies. Business schools have been particularly receptive, using happiness studies to legitimize management practices. The fundamental assumption-that happiness causes productivity rather than vice versa-drives business-oriented happiness research, despite methodological flaws like self-reporting (demonstrated when finding a planted dime significantly affected subjects' reported life satisfaction).
Chapter 7
The Politics of Happiness: When Feeling Good Replaces Doing Good
British Prime Minister David Cameron's 2010 announcement of plans to measure national wellbeing came during a time of student protests, union mobilization against austerity, and economic recession. Cameron framed the happiness initiative not as contradicting his economic priorities but complementing them: "I am absolutely clear that our most urgent priority is to get the economy moving...We're trying to make it easier for people to start their own business, we're cutting corporate tax, we're getting behind entrepreneurs." This aligned perfectly with positive psychology's message that external circumstances matter little for happiness-a convenient position when implementing austerity measures.
Rather than merely distracting from austerity, Cameron's happiness initiative represented a fundamental reframing of governance-positioning happiness as an attitude that empowers people to change their own situations without government support. In this framework, cutting benefits becomes not punishment but motivation to transform "passive overweight blobs" into resilient entrepreneurs.
The fundamental question of how we know we're happy proves elusive in both academic and everyday contexts. Our standard greeting-"How's it going?"-forces the respondent to quickly assemble a coherent self-narrative that often has little to do with their actual experience. Alenka Zupancic brilliantly identifies the question's inherent tension between two subjects: the "it" (one's external life circumstances) and the unspoken "I" (one's internal state). The standard response-"Very well, thank you"-maintains this ambiguity while potentially masking the truth: "It is going very well. But me-well, that's another matter."
This tension manifests in what Bourdieu calls "petit-bourgeois suffering"-middle-class families trapped in "good-life fantasies" (as Lauren Berlant terms them) that have become increasingly unachievable. They pursue project "it" through perfect houses, suburbs, and lifestyles, only to find themselves locked in impossible constraints, isolated and exhausted.
Modern society has undergone a profound shift from prohibition to mandatory enjoyment. Where traditional society required suppressing desires to fit in, we now face a moral imperative to express desires and pursue happiness without delay. As Pascal Bruckner observes, we're expected to be happy 24/7, not just during designated leisure hours.
Chapter 8
The Quantified Self: Tracking, Optimizing, and Selling Yourself
When Chris Dancy lost his job in 2009, he didn't pursue traditional job-hunting tactics but instead embraced extreme self-tracking. "If you can measure it, someone will, and that somebody should be you," he explains. Using multiple bodily sensors to monitor everything from pulse to REM sleep to toilet habits, Dancy exemplifies the "quantified self movement" that promises "self-knowledge through numbers."
This isn't Socrates' philosophical self-examination but a market-driven reconfiguration of the self as product. The quantified self movement has exploded with the rise of affordable wearable technologies. Enthusiasts track sleep patterns, heart rates, moods, and environmental factors, then analyze correlations and share findings at "Show-and-Tells" where they reveal intimate details of bodily functions.
This compulsion goes beyond eliminating bad habits-it's about reconfiguring the entire self as a streamlined business. One entrepreneur described his life-logging as "running a start-up," constantly analyzing performance metrics. This perfectly embodies what Philip Mirowski calls "the ideal neo-liberal agent" who sees herself simultaneously as "employee, product, advertisement, manager, biographer, and entrepreneur."
Corporate interests have embraced these technologies, with hedge fund GLG Partners tracking traders' sleep and diet patterns, then offering "coaching" to improve bodily routines. The Chicago Teachers Union was forced to accept a contract requiring members to share biometric information and wellness activities or face a $600 penalty. This represents what Gilles Deleuze called "societies of control," where boundaries between work and life dissolve completely, and surveillance becomes omnipresent yet seductively packaged as personal empowerment.
A growing genre of games aims not to provide escape but to make people more effective and productive in all areas of life. Gamification applies game logic to real-world situations, transforming boring activities through rewards-badges, points, or money-that incentivize continued and improved performance. For those wanting to gamify their entire existence, "Epic Win" turns everyday tasks into quests where your avatar earns rewards for completing laundry or answering emails.
This approach revives B.F. Skinner's behavioral psychology, which found that organisms respond to rewards and reinforced behaviors persist over time. The paradox deepens as self-trackers willingly submit to authoritarian techniques while violently protesting government data collection. Their Orwellian fears focus exclusively on governments while ignoring corporations like Google, Facebook, and Axciom that collect vast amounts of personal data.
Chapter 9
Finding Freedom: Resistance and Escape from the Wellness Imperative
Illness, surprisingly, can bring unexpected pleasure. In Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical novel "My Struggle," he describes breaking his collarbone during football and experiencing an unlikely enjoyment upon returning home: "After eating I lay down on the sofa with a cushion behind my back watching an Italian football match on TV." This simple act was extraordinary-in four years of having children, he'd only experienced such leisure once before when severely ill.
Web developer Rob Lucas expresses a similar sentiment about illness providing respite from work's constant demands. He writes that "it is only when sickness comes and I am involuntarily rendered incapable of work that I really regain any extra time for myself." For Lucas, illness isn't merely pathological but "almost willed-a holiday that the body demands for itself."
The Fat Acceptance movement frames fatness as a civil rights issue, comparing weight discrimination to other forms of prejudice. They've successfully campaigned against discriminatory billboards and supported legal protections. However, their conferences often focus on lifestyle issues like water aerobics, self-love, and sexuality. Paradoxically, Fat Acceptance advocates often emphasize other wellness values-being socially outgoing, hard-working and adventurous-while rejecting only the slim body ideal.
"Barebacking"-gay men having sex without condoms-directly challenges wellness ethics through unsafe sex. Tim Dean's book "Unlimited Intimacy" explores this subculture, explaining it's "an activity deeply invested with meaning." The community divides into "bug-chasers" who seek HIV infection (viewing it as a "gift") and "gift-givers" who knowingly transmit the virus. This practice emerged partly as a reaction to the AIDS epidemic, which prompted efforts to rehabilitate gay men's image through promoting sexual responsibility and safe sex.
What makes this subculture particularly significant is its deliberate rejection of wellness ideology. It questions the image of the well-maintained body as potentially immortal and expresses "skepticism regarding ideals of health and risk-avoidance." Unlike Fat Acceptance advocates who embrace most wellness values while rejecting only one aspect, barebackers resolutely reject the health imperative entirely, inverting wellness demands in a way that shocks prevailing moral norms.
Chapter 10
Beyond Wellness: Finding Joy in an Age of Optimization
In contrast to the managed pleasures of wellness culture, Zadie Smith's essay "Joy" explores the rare, uncontrollable emotion that "presupposes surprise and elation." Smith describes joy as a disruptive force that shakes us brutally-an emotion so intense she's experienced it only five or six times in her life. Unlike pleasure, which we carefully regulate like diabetics monitoring sugar levels, joy cannot be measured or optimized. This distinction becomes crucial in understanding how modern society has conflated momentary happiness with profound joy, attempting to package and sell transcendent experiences as consumable products.
Smith vividly recalls a transformative night at London's Fabric club, dancing on ecstasy with a rail-thin stranger she calls Smiley. "We gave ourselves over to joy," she writes, distinguishing this overwhelming experience from mere pleasure: "A beach holiday is pleasure. But on that dance floor I was joy." The impermanence of this moment gives it meaning-unlike replaceable everyday pleasures, joy arrives unexpectedly and cannot be replicated. The raw authenticity of this experience stands in stark contrast to today's curated moments of "peak experiences" that flood social media feeds and wellness retreats.
Two decades later, nearby club Morning Glory represents wellness culture's sanitized alternative: no drugs, no alcohol, just early morning dancing for city workers before heading to the office. "It's like clubbing, but instead of crawling out into the darkness afterwards feeling horrible, you go to work feeling great," an organizer explains. This club epitomizes the modern marriage of pleasure with productivity-a place for the "fun-loving, extroverted individual who loves to work and party, especially when the two are combined." The commodification of experience has reached its logical conclusion: even rebellion must now serve the bottom line.
Finding escape from the wellness syndrome requires stopping our obsessive bodily self-monitoring, abandoning fixations with health and happiness, and rejecting the illusion of limitless human potential. We must recognize that as humans, we're defined not just by our potential but by our impotence-our inevitable failures and limitations. What makes life worthwhile is often the pain it entails: truth brings misery, political action involves danger, beauty contains sorrow, and love tears us apart. The pursuit of pure pleasure leads to a sanitized existence that paradoxically drains life of its vital essence.
The wellness industry's promise of perpetual optimization ignores fundamental human truths: that growth often comes through struggle, that meaningful connections arise from shared vulnerability, and that joy's rarity makes it precious. Choosing only pleasure might minimize unwellness, but it leads to isolation and a diminished experience of life's full spectrum. Instead of dwelling on our own sickness, we should address the sickness of the world, engaging with life's complexities rather than retreating into the false security of wellness culture's promises.
