August 23, 2023

"My interests were moving out of this idea of self-optimization. I think what happens in the wellness world is this desire for control and certainty...."

"I don’t think the answers are deep inside myself. If anything, the answers are in the collective, in recontextualizing ourselves and realigning ourselves with other women."
 
Said Elise Loehnen, out of wellness world but still speaking the mystifying lingo of wellness world, quoted in "She Outgrew the Wish to Be Perfect/For years Elise Loehnen peddled wellness for Gwyneth Paltrow. Her new book explores 'the price women pay to be good'" (NYT).

Notice that she's saying that being inside Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop made her too individualistic, and she needed to leave the cult to become more of a collectivist. What?!

ADDED: I think what's really going on here is that Loehen is trying to establish her own business, parallel to Paltrow's, and the rest is nonsense. She's still "peddling wellness."  

37 comments:

Clyde said...

Awash in a sea of buzzwords. I recently had the privilege (?) of watching training videos at work where the Postmaster General told us about how they were "ferociously" tackling the economic challenges in our business model. By the end, I felt like I'd been showered with buzzwords.

rehajm said...

Thats some quality estrogen word salad. Not to worry- Oprah’s chefs make good on their own…

Kakistocracy said...

A fit physique is the ultimate status symbol. It shows that you can commit to one thing for years with slow results. People trust you more because they know you won't throw them away at the first hint of difficulty. Go to the gym.

FleetUSA said...

"recontextualizing" Barf.

RideSpaceMountain said...

Her new book does not smell like her vagina. It actually smells like a spicy curry simmering on a stove all day or a pungent pot of chitterlings. Everyone else is peddling wellness, but not her. Who needs wellness when you've got chitterling curry.

The Crack Emcee said...

What I notice, first, is how 'wellness' like 'woke' is seen as a separate, independent phenomena, and not yet another ugly belief from under the umbrella of toxic interests known as the NewAge movement. How does that happen? Do you need the mayor of New York to come, wave his bracelets in your face and scream "crystal energy!", before you realize you're talking about the same thing? Sure, 'wellness' has been adopted by the medical community, so can be seen in hospitals and pharmacies like Rite Aid and Walmart, while 'woke' is mostly seen on college campuses, corporate boardrooms, and movies, etc. but it's the NewAge movement that's closing in on us, not a bunch of separate things.

Second, I notice - with no prompting from me - Ann now notices the NewAge movement's a 'cult' with it's own 'mystifying lingo' that all cults eventually create, while dismissing another obvious aspect of every cult - solipsism - as 'nonsense' (Two-out-of-three ain't bad, Ann).

Third, I notice, 'pedaling wellness' Is no longer called what it's always been: grifting. Americans in the old West were famous for chasing these people out of town with shotguns. That today "you get your news from Chris Cuomo on CNN while he's married to a woman selling quackery out the back door" reveals a nation's willingness to engage in, both, deceit AND a level of self-deception worthy of The Matrix, that It's hard to imagine Americans accepting, yet the NewAge movement has turned into a lifestyle.

Finally, when a journalist like Chris Cuomo has more than one family member making a business of grifting - and doesn't acknowledge their fraud as wrong or try to stop it in any way - how can America expect journalism to expose all the Gwyneth Paltrow's - Oprah, Marianne Williamson, even the Kardashians, etc. - who are invested in lying to us for a living? How many layers of cultural armor are there to the NewAge movement if journalists are involved in covering for it?

Earnest Prole said...

Middle- to upper-middle-class American white women: The richest, freest, best-educated women in human history, and also somehow the unhappiest.

Temujin said...

I think it'd better called, "The price women pay for a subscription to the New York Times to read about people like themselves."

Bob Boyd said...

This Candle Smells Like the Collective Vagina

Bob Boyd said...

Believe It or Not This Candle Actually Smells Better Now Than It Did When I Was Obsessed With Wellness.

Bob Boyd said...

My Candle Smells Better Than Gwenyth Paltrow's Ever Even Thought About Smelling

Bob Boyd said...

This Candle Smells Like My Steamer Is For Sale On Craig's List

The Crack Emcee said...

Earnest Prole said...
Middle- to upper-middle-class American white women: The richest, freest, best-educated women in human history, and also somehow the unhappiest.

"I don't know what in the fuck is going on, but I think white women started it"

- Bill Burr

You will notice there's been no major investigation of this phenomena

Meade said...

This Candle Smells Like Rhhardin’s Bicycle Helmet

RideSpaceMountain said...

"Middle- to upper-middle-class American white women: The richest, freest, best-educated women in human history, and also somehow the unhappiest."

My wife was not raised in the US. After we were married I showed her some article or such showcasing for a thousandth time some small piece of American white female ingratitude. Her response then has been the same ever since, "they're going to miss it when it's gone."

I always ask her why they couldn't just start over for themselves. She always says, "they would never", but the way she says it in Portuguese "they would never" comes across as they would never stoop so low, or they wouldn't deign to....

Still in love.

Kate said...

Basically, she realized she was thinking like an anorexic and discovered the wisdom of a 12-step program.

Also, @Meade -- I literally spit-taked my coffee.

farmgirl said...

“ Notice that she's saying that being inside Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop…”. Ick.

cassandra lite said...

"recontextualizing ourselves and realigning ourselves with other women."

Same wine, different bottle, Berkeley c. 1970-1977. The recontextualizing often began with shedding your top and anything else that might have been under it while dancing at parties, forming into a kind of hava nagila circle...usually around the woman with the best rack. Tribal atavism?

Quaestor said...

Speaking of wellness, I’ve spent spent the post-Eighties mentally ordering the Universe according to importance and beauty, which is my version of Aristotelian happiness, or wellness if you insist.

I am pleased to report I am making measurable progress. For example, recent observations of extremely distant supernovae indicate a value for the cosmological constant that is at least 55 orders of magnitude less than String Theory requires to be mathematically valid. Therefore, I can push that un-beautiful and unprovable notion down in my ordering of Everything to a much lower level where it can keep company with poikilothermic dinosaurs. In another decade or two, someone will mention String Theory and my brain will go like huh?. That’s wellness. And just this morning, Althouse brings up Gwyneth Paltrow, and that triggers the welcome and comforting mental huh? as profoundly and forthrightly as I hope my brain will someday greet such unpleasantries as the Joe Biden Residency and the Kardashians. I had to do an image search on the name to connect her with anything. Ah, wellness, you are on the horizon at last.

Quaestor said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
n.n said...

Perception, health, and diversity (e.g. class-disordered ideology) with handmade judgment and labels published daily is a sign of our time past, present, and progressive.

Yancey Ward said...

Yep, Althouse nailed it.

Owen said...

“…still peddling wellness.” Should be “…still peddling total self-absorption.”

What a sterile pursuit.

Biff said...

I guess "mystifying lingo" is a polite euphemism for "bullshit."

Somehow, I knew before looking it up that Elise Loehnen was a Yale English major.

CJinPA said...

I think what's really going on here is that Loehen is trying to establish her own business, parallel to Paltrow's, and the rest is nonsense. She's still "peddling wellness."

Before I got to this line I was thinking "She's targeting the same audience." And she has a powerful media outlet to help her peddle her feminism-infused, perfumed, cultural Marxism.

Original Mike said...

"I don’t think the answers are deep inside myself. "

What are the questions?

Jupiter said...

"What?!"

I think that for once, you have said all there is to say on a topic.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

"Middle- to upper-middle-class American white women: The richest, freest, best-educated women in human history, and also somehow the unhappiest."

Are you new here? That's just a measure of how badly men have let women down!

Tina Trent said...

Plenty of white men, and black women, and black men, and others, are peddling the same woo-doo. But only white women are the punching bags for both the Left and the Right. Eff off boyos: plenty of guys born with dicks of many colors behave the same way. Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, atheist, spaghetti monster, gay, straight.

I met a lot of bad people on the Left, but there's nothing worse than a puffed-up misogynist leftist earth-shoe-wearing white male feminist.

Yancey Ward said...

"What are the questions?"

What is 6 x 9?

friscoda said...

ADDED: I think what's really going on here is that Loehen is trying to establish her own business, parallel to Paltrow's, and the rest is nonsense. She's still "peddling wellness.


She's peddling something alright.

Leslie Graves said...

Ditto 100%.

Iman said...

“This Candle Smells Like Rhhardin’s Bicycle Helmet.”

D’OH!

Mikey NTH said...

The wellness stuff goes back to at least the Battle Creek Sanitorium and the Kelloggs, if not earlier. At least we got corn flakes out of that.

boatbuilder said...

Golf clap for Meade at 7:20. Well done, Sir.

William said...

If you live within your income, exercise your mind and body regularly, and eat a healthy diet, your default state will be a mild contentment. That's sufficient for me, but no great opera or novel was ever written about the quest for such contentment. I guess you got to gilt it up if you want to launch a product line based on such insights.

Bunkypotatohead said...

Is she offering a candle that smells like her asshole?
Everybody's got one and everybody thinks everyone else's stinks.