The solitude of self-care: how Wellness culture’s inward gaze is costing us our collective strength

By Isabel Duggan

In this era of late-stage capitalism, we are united in our shared experiences of burn out and existential despair. Yet, the individual pursuit of wellness has threatened to draw us away from the collective healing - and the progress - we can find in community.

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As a young person, navigating the endless online stream of curated lives, advice, and ideals that shape how we see both ourselves and the world has become an inescapable part of life. In this digital landscape, ‘wellness culture’ transpires as a guiding doctrine, promising that the right routine, ritual, or product can make us whole.

Wellness algorithms have emerged as a kind of digital monasticism, whereby our scrolling guides us toward rituals of ‘self-care’ and ‘protecting our peace’, as we worship the perfect morning routine and what it means to be a ‘clean girl’. We become drawn to each new gospel of health, fitness, and medicine as sold to us by our wellness prophets; the influencers that promise to ‘fix’ us through their herbs, supplements and intricate rituals of holistic nourishment.

But in a fleeting moment of clarity amid the tumbling from one looping video into the next - between one creator insisting on a warm bath and switching off the news, and another nudging me to tighten boundaries in my friendships - I catch a thought that feels unshaped by the algorithm. Why does ‘healing’ increasingly look like disappearing? Is a retreat into a curated solitude what it means to be well? More importantly, what happens at the collective scale when we turn so far inwards, we forget to look outwards?

Photo by Ewan Yap on Unsplash

The concept of ‘wellness’ has ancient beginnings, once firmly grounded in spirituality, morality, and cosmic balance. In ancient China, healing was woven into communal life through seasonal festivals, and collective group practices like qigong. Aboriginal traditions in Australia centred wellness on restoring harmony between people, spirit, and Country. Centuries later, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau echoed this, insisting that true health and happiness arose from supportive communities and closeness to nature. Ultimately, across a myriad of cultures and eras, wellness was consistently thought of as something sustained by, and for, the community.

Over time, however, this collective vision of wellness began to erode. In the late 1950s, Dr Halbert L. Dunn popularised the term ‘high-level Wellness’ defining it as "a condition of change in which the individual moves forward, climbing toward a higher potential of functioning". While seemingly progressive, this redefinition placed the emphasis squarely on the individual rather than the community. In the decades since, wellness has been absorbed into a culture of consumerism: it is now Gwenyth Paltrow's ‘Goop’, Kourtney Kardashian’s ‘Lemme’, the $100 yoga mat, and a subscription to a meditation app. Co-opted by capitalism, Wellness has been reframed as a personal project of the self.

The messaging that your ‘unwellness’ is solely your responsibility is taking a troubling toll. It should come as no surprise that obsessively controlling and tracking self-improvement metrics such as diet, exercise, sleep, and skincare carries emotional consequences. Indeed, according to the Department of Health, Disability, and Ageing, the number of young Australians reporting body image distress has surged 33% since 2009. At the same time, we are facing a loneliness epidemic, one that the isolating nature of these trends may well be fuelling.

If this hyper individualised messaging becomes a dominant framework through which health and wellbeing is understood (and one may argue that this is already the case), then the implications extend far beyond personal anxiety or body image distress. When care is framed as a personal obligation, it implicitly teaches that social, economic, and environmental systems are irrelevant to our wellbeing, with the burden of change entirely belonging to the individual. Essentially, if we’re so preoccupied with ‘healing’ ourselves, then we’re distracted from looking at the systemic flaws that may have contributed to our ‘unwellness’ in the first place. Politically and civically, this translates to disengagement. If healing is a private project, there is less incentive to participate in collective action, advocate for equitable healthcare, or address systemic issues like workplace stress, housing insecurity, or environmental degradation.

For example, wellness culture often prescribes self-care as a response to burnout, promoting things like taking a bubble bath after a long workday. But these remedies obscure the larger structural causes of exhaustion, such as unpaid labour, or exploitative corporate culture. Collective action, like advocating for better labour protections, becomes deprioritised because ‘balance’ is framed as a private pursuit. We see this pattern exist across public health, mental health, social inclusion, and environmental justice, to name a few.

In this sense, social media’s framing of wellness fosters a culture of introspection that undermines communal resilience and the collective action necessary for meaningful societal change. The emphasis on ‘healing yourself’ individualises systemic problems and risks depoliticising important issues.

So, is there a balance to strike between individual wellness and collective wellbeing? How can we reframe wellness models so that one can engage in protest and still #protectmypeace?

This encouragement to look outwardly is no call to martyrdom or self-sacrifice. Indeed, there is an important place for rest, solitude, and self-reflection. However, perhaps a recognition that our algorithms frame wellness as a personal responsibility, and an acceptance that wellbeing can be a collective act, may free us from the burden of self-perfection in the name of ‘being well’.

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About the author

Isabel Duggan

Isabel Duggan is in her final year of a Bachelor of Global Studies at Monash University, where she specialises in International Studies. Informed by overseas study and travel, she is curious about how social and cultural ideas expand, transform, and shape communities. As a young person, researcher, and writer, Isabel aims to bring a fresh and contemporary perspective to discussions on society and culture.