When you listen to the word welfareWhat do you imagine?
Yoga pants and green juice? Organic products? High -end essential oils and crystals? A fashion retreat in the mountains? A perfectly cured morning routine on Instagram?
For many women, especially those of median age, this is what has sold us well -being: elegant, expensive, aspirational and always out of reach unless we are willing to buy, hurry or shrink to get there.
But the truth? This well -being version is a trap.
In the $ 4.5 today Billón Welfare industry, we are told that if we only drink the correct supplements, we follow the appropriate diet, we wear the right clothes and we stick to the correct routine, we will finally feel whole, happy and healthy. But what really sell us is an endless loop of Not enough.
Especially for median women, the industrial welfare complex has focused on our insecurities (aged skin, changing bodies, emotional overwhelming) and packed them in trouble to be solved.
In this essay, we are calling shit in that narrative.
We are exploring how the modern welfare industry has commercialized, numb our emotional health and trained us to believe that we are a constant project. And we are asking the deepest question: What happens if true well -being is not something you buy, but something you claim?
How we get here
Somewhere on the road, our conception of well -being became more superficial and commercial.
The Industrial Welfare Complex has always been linked to healthy food and drinks, cured clothing and access to exclusive withdrawals and spas. These are easy, clean and instagramable parts of what well -being can contribute to our lives.
Welfare, as is commonly accepted, is an active and continuous search that gives the promise of an ideal. And that ideal can be yoursYeah Spend the correct amount of money and use the right products.
The dark side? This model requires that we stay in a constant state of improvement. Who we are at this time is never enough. There is always something to fix.
Welfare has been reduced to merchandise, something you can buy. A problem that always needs a solution, preferably in the form of a high -end artisanal product. And most of the time, it is reduced to physical well -being: the endless persecution to rock a bikini, lose the last ten pounds or believe that juice cleansing will prevent the disease.
Self -love is bad for business
Here is the thing: the Industrial Welfare Complex does not want you to love yourself.
If we all did it suddenly, the industry would collapse.
You don’t want you to accept your body shape, your skin tone, sexuality or your age. Like Aubrey Gordon, podcast coanfrerion Maintenance phaseHe says: «You are supposed to want to be thinner, younger, whiter and more blond.»
And now? The median age has become the newest battlefield. It is as if the welfare industry suddenly realized that there are women over 50, and have money to spend. So where do you want us to inves that money?
In procedures, products and potions that promise to erase our age.
What we are losing in the process
When hyperense in the physical, we leave our atrophy of mental and emotional well -being.
Many of us do not know what it feels like to be ourselves not anymore. We are numb with information, with content, with consumption. We do not know how rest is really seen. And we are not excellent to name our emotions.
A study led by Brené Brown found that most adults can only identify three emotions: happiness, sadness and anger. (Meanwhile, researcher Marc Brackett, Ph.D., author of Permission to feelsays there are at least 144)
Because we lack emotional support, both personal and systemically, we resort to coping mechanisms: alcohol, drugs, purchases, binge. Not to heal, but to disconnect.
Ironically, well -being in itself can become a way of numb. We look at perfection. We are treated as a project. We forget how to offer us grace.
And sometimes it seems that it is exactly where the welfare industry loves us: in areas in our sofas, buying our way to «better.»
In this way, it is less likely that we will not destruction of women’s medical care or the deep inequality in accessing well -being support.
What happens if we turn the script?
What happens if we turn all this in your head?
What would happen if the well -being was not something delivered by brands and influencers? But something created by us, for us?
Imagine that.
We could start by accepting ourselves. As we are. Think about time, energy and money we would save if we would stop pursuing impossible standards.
We could create space to focus on our emotional and mental well -being, not only in our physical form. We could move from individual responsibility to collective attention. We could build well -being communities that are accessible to all.
We remember that self -esteem has nothing to do with the number on a scale or size of our pants.
I am 55 years old. I am divorced. I am sober. I am not supposed to love myself. But I do it.
It is supposed to want to change my appearance. To recover my youth. To get rid of laughter and frown eyebrow. It is supposed to want surgery to «look better.»
But not. I like who I am.
I have seen that brilliant and beautiful women were beaten for missing one day in their fitness calendar or not maintaining a rigid intermittent fasting schedule. I have seen ourselves follow the Gurus and the influencers instead of consulting with ourselves and asking what In fact need.
One thing that is rarely asked to do?
Decelerate. And remember who we are already.
Let’s do that instead. Are you with me? «
