The global wellness economy reached 6.8 trillion dollars in 2024. It is four times larger than the global pharmaceutical industry, larger than tourism, than the information technology sector, than all of what is called the green economy. It grows at 7.9% per year and is projected to surpass 9.8 trillion before the decade ends. The fastest-growing segment is not the spa or the boutique gym, but mental wellness, which has advanced at 12.4% annually since 2019. These figures do not describe a passing trend or an elite luxury. They describe one of the most silent transformations in contemporary capitalism, the systematic conversion of collective suffering into an individual market.
The Market That Thrives on Anguish
The industry does not grow despite the world getting worse. It grows because the world gets worse. The years of greatest expansion in wellness coincide with peaks in economic inequality, with the worsening of labour conditions in the service sector, with the generalised precarity that economists euphemistically call “labour market flexibilisation”. The correlation is not accidental. It is structural. Each time a system produces more anguish than it can politically absorb, the market intervenes to offer a technical solution to the problem it itself has created.
In Colombia, the phenomenon takes recognisable forms. According to Euromonitor International, more than 60% of Colombians have incorporated “healthy lifestyle” habits and seek experiences that bring calm and fulfilment. Yoga classes proliferate in Chapinero and El Poblado. Meditation retreats in the Eje Cafetero fill with professionals who pay between 800,000 and 2,000,000 pesos for a weekend of disconnection. Applications like Calm and Headspace exceed 30 million global subscribers, with tens of thousands of new downloads daily. The corporate wellness industry in Latin America bills hundreds of millions of dollars annually and recorded growth close to 70% in the post-pandemic period. The market works. So does the anguish.
What distinguishes this cycle from previous ones is the speed at which supply adapts to the demand for suffering. Each new social pathology generates its corresponding wellness niche. Digital fatigue produces applications for “digital disconnection”. Urban loneliness produces community reconnection retreats. Anxiety about the future produces “climate mindfulness” workshops. The system is extraordinarily creative when it comes to monetising its own consequences. And what in another context might be called cynicism is here called market innovation, with the semantic neutrality of one who merely describes what exists.
Stress as Your Problem
The mechanism is simple, as all well-designed extraction mechanisms are. At some point between the nineteen-eighties and the present, professional stress ceased to be a problem of working conditions and became a problem of the person who works. The shift was neither abrupt nor announced. It was gradual, technical, scientifically backed by a chain of research that measured real benefits at the individual level without asking what was producing the need for those benefits. Performance psychology, the neuroscience of wellbeing, the executive coaching industry all converged on the same operational conclusion. The exhausted employee does not need better working conditions. They need better tools for managing their exhaustion.
Which means in practice that the worker who leaves exhausted from a ten-hour shift in a Bogotá call centre, or from a turn in a logistics warehouse that records their movements every thirty seconds, receives as their institutional response a subscription to a meditation application. The most advanced companies go further ; they organise mindfulness retreats for their middle managers, hire wellbeing coaches, measure their employees’ “happiness index” with the same precision with which they measure their productivity. Corporate wellbeing is not a concession to the worker. It is an investment in their performance.
Stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments.
Ron Purser and David Loy
Academia has spent at least a decade documenting this displacement. The conditions of post-industrial capitalism exhaust the emotional, psychological and cognitive faculties of workers to the limit of what is sustainable. Mindfulness intervenes to manage that exhaustion without touching the causes that produce it. This is not a conspiracy. It is an elective affinity between a technique that produces real results at the individual level and a system that has every incentive for those results to occur without anything structural changing. The worker who meditates well is a worker who performs better and demands less, and no human resources director needs to read Foucault to understand that equation.
The Subject Who Self-Exploits with Gratitude
Diagnoses of the system should not sell well in the system’s bookshops. And yet The Burnout Society, by Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, travelled from university lecture halls to bestseller lists with a speed that Han himself would have analysed with suspicion. Published in German in 2010, the book argues that neoliberal capitalism no longer operates through prohibition and repression. It operates through incitement and performance. The contemporary subject is not exploited by an employer who imposes conditions from the outside. They exploit themselves, voluntarily, in the conviction that they are realising their potential.
In the neoliberal regime, exploitation no longer takes the form of alienation and self-derealization, but rather of freedom, self-realisation and self-optimisation. Here there is no Other as exploiter who compels me to work and alienates me from myself ; rather, I voluntarily exploit myself in the belief that I am realising myself. This is the diabolical logic of neoliberalism.
Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other
This is the logic that the wellness industry completes and perfects. The subject who pays a hundred and twenty euros for a weekend meditation retreat, or fifteen dollars a month for an application that teaches them to breathe correctly, does not do so because the system imposes it. They do so because they want to be a better version of themselves. What Han points to is that this will to self-improvement is exactly what the system requires. The desire to optimise oneself is not a resistance to performance capitalism. It is its most refined fuel, because it eliminates the friction generated by the repressed subject and replaces it with the energy of the subject who self-exploits with enthusiasm.
Depression, burnout, generalised anxiety disorder. Han describes these not as individual failures but as pathologies of the performance system. The disciplinary subject that Foucault analysed could at least identify the enemy. The performance subject has no identifiable enemy. They have a goal that can always be surpassed, a version of themselves that can always be improved, and an entire industry ready to sell them the tools to get there.
Brand Spirituality
Ron Purser, professor at San Francisco State University, coined the term McMindfulness to describe what the market has done with two millennia of Buddhist practice. The technique is extracted, the political and community context is eliminated, and the purified technique is reinserted into the market as an individual consumer product, free of all collective discomfort. The result is a practice that was born to understand the interdependence of all beings and ends up being adopted by Goldman Sachs, the United States Army and the World Economic Forum in Davos, where monks and meditation coaches share panels with chief executives. Purser does not dispute that meditation works. He disputes what it works for when the system appropriates it.
In Latin America this process has a specific texture. The region has traditions of collective care that predate capitalism and have in many cases actively resisted it. But the wellness that reaches the urban middle classes of Bogotá, Santiago or Mexico City is not that heritage. It is a North American import packaged with minimalist aesthetics, English-language vocabulary and prices that exclude those who suffer most from the conditions the industry claims to alleviate. Access to wellbeing reproduces the same social segmentation that wellbeing, in its most naive version, claims to combat. The person who most needs rest and relief is the one who works in informality, without social security, without paid leave, and who cannot afford the membership of the yoga studio in Zona Rosa.
What Wellness Cannot Cure
There are conditions that no meditation application can modify. The concentration of land ownership is not corrected with breathing sessions. The informal labour rate, which exceeds 60% of the active workforce in Colombia, does not respond to yoga. The tax structure that protects capital and taxes consumption, the health system that privatises profit and socialises losses, the differential access to education according to one’s postcode of birth. None of these conditions is a symptom of poor individual emotional management. They are the architecture of the system.
Resilience is perhaps the most revealing word in the wellness lexicon. To be resilient means to recover from adversity, to adapt to difficult conditions, to absorb them without collapsing. What resilience does not ask, because the question would be politically inconvenient, is why adversity exists, who produces it, and whether any collective mechanism exists to modify its underlying conditions. Asking that would require politics. And politics, in the wellness universe, is the one thing not available on the menu.
The wellness market is not a lie. It offers real and documented benefits. Meditation reduces cortisol, exercise improves mood, quality sleep has measurable effects on health. None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute is the function these individual benefits serve within the social order. A calmer, more adapted worker, better able to manage their anguish, is a more productive worker and one less inclined to organise, to demand, to formulate collective claims the system would have to answer. Individual wellbeing and political quietude are not coincident by accident. One produces the other, with the silent efficiency of mechanisms that function best when nobody names them…
G.S.
Sources
- Global Wellness Institute. Global Wellness Economy Monitor 2025. Miami, November 2025.
- Global Wellness Institute. Country Rankings Report 2026. Miami, January 2026.
- Grand View Research. Corporate Wellness Market Size & Share Report, 2026-2033. 2026.
- Purser, Ronald E. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater Press, 2019.
- Purser, Ronald E. and David Loy. “Beyond McMindfulness”. Huffington Post, 2013.
- Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2015 (Eng. ed.).
- Han, Byung-Chul. The Expulsion of the Other. Polity Press, 2018 (Eng. ed.).
- Springer. “Corporate Mindfulness and the Pathologization of Workplace Stress”. In Handbook of Mindfulness, chap. 14. 2016.
- Euromonitor International. Wellness Trends in Latin America. 2024.
- Portafolio. “El auge del bienestar: cómo la cultura wellness redefine hábitos, economía y salud”. Bogotá, June 2025.
