A few weeks ago the New York Times ran an article about an avant-garde tribe of venture capitalists who are investing in shrooms, psychedelics, astrology, and other sundry forms of altered-state wellness businesses. The cover image depicted a unicorn galloping with a trail of starry shrooms behind it. It was clever and catchy and made me think the piece would be farcical, or at least unserious; but the further I dipped into it the less I detected any such tone, much less any eyebrow raising.
By the end of it I had entered my own altered state. I was confused, dismayed, mildly amused, suspicious. The article is successful at spinning something essentially dubious into something brave sounding and high minded. A glance at the text and certain sauce words start popping out at you: ‘the wellness gap’, ‘arbitrage opportunity’, ‘vice industry’ companies, ‘undervalued’ opportunities. All throughout you see this work of verbal wiggery, but when you strip it away you’re left with a bald idea: big money chases sketchy fix.
What do we make of an article like this? On the one hand it’s unsurprising that even among venture capitalists, that most privileged of business society, there must be some consigned to sniffing the fringes of industry for a golden ticket. On the other hand, when fringe-sniffing is dubbed ‘wellness’, and held up as a model of business virtue, I feel something has gone amiss.
A few weeks ago I may have dismissed the story and sent it to compost, but in light of the strange new world we’re living in, I feel it has been given a dose of urgency and is worthy of reconsideration. The pandemic, like a sieve, has had the curious effect of making a lot of otherwise big, newsworthy stories utterly mush, and other smaller events suddenly important. I believe this piece falls in the latter since it deals with wellness, and these days we’re all wondering how to be well. It’s a conversation we’ve been thrust into.
To be sure, wellness is not a novel concept; one might even argue that the term, taken loosely, simply describes the perennial goal of the human race. But even in more recent times, wellness has been around. Thirty years ago the agrarian writer, Wendell Berry, foresaw that the growing mention of wellness in his day foretold the widespread unwellness spreading throughout society. Wellness, he observed, implies health, and health implies wholeness; therefore unwellness implied unwholeness: the disintegration of individual persons and communities.
Furthermore he suspected that any attempt to quickly heal and set things right was unlikely to achieve its end, especially if those strategies ignored root issues, such man’s moral prerogative: one’s responsibility to be good and not simply to feel good. He was wary of solutions and strategies that focused exclusively on the latter, which exemplified what he called industrial optimism; the implicit belief that with enough money, manpower, scientific backing, and humanitarian mission statements, the evils of the world will disappear.
This kind of optimism is apparent in the article at hand; the author repeatedly refers to the niche group of wellness investors it profiles as “bellwethers“; those with their pulse on wellness, who see where it’s going and will point the way. My problem with this metaphor is that it assumes that wellness is a wind; a changeful trend more than a stable condition, and one that will inevitably come from outside rather than inside.
To be fair, the author does concede that many, if not most, of these altered state investments have yet to be proven effective or considered safe over the long-term. But this shouldn’t be surprising either. The truth is that altered states, whatever the going definition these days, is the oldest broom in the closet. Man, since time immemorial has been drinking, drugging, doping, and dazing himself against the perilous edge of reality with varying levels of success. And he will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. What’s changed these days is not the intent behind the act, but the scale at which it is done, and the potency of the fix. These days altered states is big business, and big business means the ability to twist the realities of whole populations, for better or for worse.
In this regard, the article is also reminiscent of another recent social diagnosis by the columnist, Ross Douthat, who calls our time a decadent age. It is a time marked by high overall economic prosperity, great amounts of convenience and comfort, and yet gullible to throwing funny money at the next best thing, even if the next best thing is a dupe. He cites the stories of businesses like Thanatos and Wework, which earned early acclaim and wooed millions only to fritter it away with smoke and mirrors.
Will the wellness investors follow suit? I won’t write them off just yet, but I’m wary. To paraphrase the journalist GK Chesterton, when it comes to wellness I believe that it’s not that the old solutions haven’t worked; it’s that they’ve been found difficult and left untried.
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