Part 1: Goop, Gerp, Chirp: How the Goop Movement is Repackaging Consumerism
Because health = more, yea?
Edited by: Alyson Chatterjee & Jenna Movsowitz
The year is 2029. It’s been 10 years since the COVID-19 pandemic. And the seeds that were planted when time felt like it stopped are now in full bloom.
Aperol Spritzes are a thing of European summers’ past, replaced by sueros and herbal joints. Elixirs to “add to the moment” and “elevate the senses” rather than bring us further from our physical form.
It’s now standard for cold plunges to be found on NYC rooftops, and no gym is worth joining if its amenities don’t include an infrared sauna.
As we look at this wellness world in full bloom, one can’t help but consider – where did this movement find its roots?
Insert the “goop” philosophy
This concept, while still currently niche and mostly confined to the upper realms of society — think suburban moms, SF tech bros, and NYC clean girls — has the eventuality to evolve into the world painted lines above, ie. health-coded super consumption.
While wellness as a social currency certainly began prior to Gwyneth Paltrow’s pop-off, the movement gained notable momentum around the same time that yoni eggs entered the modern lexicon.
goop, founded by starlet Gwyneth Paltrow as her wellness recommendation newsletter, has since evolved into one of the largest wellness authorities and retailers in the US, hitting peak revenue of $18M in 2023 alone.
The company defines itself as, “an indispensable resource of finding products, tools, tips, and experts to bring more agency, depth, and joy to life.”
Wondering how the words “agency” and “indispensable” can be used in the same sentence?
Welcome to the world of wellness.
Transcendence: now available on the AppStore
Green juice powders, gut-microbiome supplements, weighted workout rings, and breathwork meditation apps – each a new flavor of optimization. Of making yOu fEeL bEeTtEr! Not to mention the CPG experts that name these companies with words like Poosh, Bloom, Goop…did we miss the memo about one-syllable, double-vowel brand names equating to improved wellbeing?
This trend is reminiscent of when a bunch of tech companies started to use “-ify” as a suffix to give the feeling of automation and control. We started to see these companies pop up everywhere: Shopify, Spotify, Giphy, Postify.
They all did the same thing in different verticals. The names suggest a focus on transformation and improvement, to make processes easier and more efficient. It made our world homogenous. Everything became “efficient” and “techified.” C’mon Silicon Valley.
It took the joy away from finding new music from your friends; why do that when your Spotify algorithm will tell you what to listen to in your Discover Weekly playlist?
Call it a reach, but this is a potential uncanny parallel for the homogenization and outsourcing of the health and wellness sphere. We ought to add something to our lives for personal development.
Less is….less?
The wellness-industrial-complex exudes a feeling of “not enough”. How dare we as humans have been born with everything we need to live an “agent, deep, and joyous” life. *cough, cough.*
Why do we need $100 lululemon leggings to do yoga? Our grandparents did yoga in their pajamas in the morning in India and ate ashwagandha before it was a trend.
Why do we need an app to meditate – isn’t the point of meditating in removing everything around us and just letting ourselves be?
The la mer moisturizer serves the same function as the one from Target. Do not get us started on 10-year-olds buying Drunk Elephant retinol from Sephora when they should be memorizing their times tables.
People, old and young, are being told they need more, more, more to fit in, to be accepted, to reach a state of wellness.
The funny thing is, wellness is not about more. It’s about removing, letting go, transcending. Wellness is about learning to exist in uncertainty, not consuming anything and everything to escape said uncertainty.
We can go from vitamin to vitamin, SoulCycle to pilates, but another horizontal leap will only land us on another treadmill. Buying something new will not liberate us. The ultimate escape – transcendence – is vertical, not horizontal.
True wellness is rising above the need to add more.
It makes sense why these health one-hit-wonders have found such deep success. Health and wellness became a sort of hum behind consumer-spending. The art of bettering oneself now is something to achieve, rather than a state of being.
Clawing at the cure
Consumers desire to look externally for a “cure”, something that will fix their internal void. It is the easier way out, of course, and in a world of short attention spans and dopamine-addicted instant-gratification fueled thinking, we will buy anything to shortcut a state of health. It’s almost as if the wellness industry is putting a fresh coat of paint over crumbling walls.
Rather than embracing the true essence of wellness, which is rooted in looking inward, the wellness industrial complex will do anything to make the consumer believe we are missing something, that we ought to fill some externally imposed lack by buying whatever the lifestyle influencer, who seemingly has their life together on TikTok, is selling us on their Amazon Storefront.
Gen Z are facing a struggling economy, climate doom, and political uncertainty. Kids now do not have the privilege of questioning norms when heightened automation and tech integration is what they are born into. What we view as “biohacking” is simply their everyday.
While we have the privilege to intentionally “harness the power of feedback loops”, young adults today have trouble experiencing love and intimacy due to pornography and digital media.
Everything is optimized on apps. Instagram is the modern day piazza. Passive surveillance creates a fear-based environment, where everyone is afraid of being perceived. Kids are on edge and anxious. It is only imperative that without any serious cultural discourse (that is accessible and inviting), this generation looks externally for a “cure”, or copes through conspicuous consumption. Hello PUFF BAR-toking friend on the L train.
In short, within our cultural landscape, people chase the things that will offer temporary relief, often serving as devices to numb the underlying discontent or dissatisfaction with life.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll look at the impact that this has on social capital, the direction of consumer demands, andddd at what point our humanity takes center stage once more.
Stay well. :P
Blasé situation room vibes…
It’s giving hot nerd summer. Group editing session slay.
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Glossary:
Biohacking: broad and often controversial term that encompasses a range of activities and practices aimed at enhancing physical, mental, and emotional performance through various techniques and interventions.
Feedback Loops: systems in which outputs of a process are fed back into the system as inputs, creating a cycle of influence that can either enhance or diminish the process.
Passive Surveillance: a method of data collection in which information is gathered without active intervention or direct contact with the subjects being observed, an example being social media.
References:
Goop Revenue: Annual, Quarterly, and Historic
Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops
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