“Wellness” is not just alternative medicine, it is essentially a theory of the body which posits if something makes you feel better, you are better in some meaningful way. I would argue it one of the most commonly held nonreligious magical beliefs in the modern world.
Wellness as a concept has its genesis in the 1950s with “workplace wellness” programs, a sort of budget alternative to offering employee healthcare benefits. This was an era soaked in itinerant business preachers offering classes on things like “hypnosis at a management level” and “yoga to improve leadership abilities”. I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much.
The capitalist medical system regularly abandons people. We’ve all heard stories of profit driven pharmaceudical companies holding the ill hostage for extreme markup on life-saving medicines. People have real, legitimate, reasons to mistrust medical professionals.
Let’s say you have chronic pain, and everything your doctor offers you is either ineffective, expensive, or addictive. You are desperate for literally any release, so you start looking into other solutions. You will find an OCEAN of snake-oil salesmen willing to sell you “the secrets doctors don’t want you to know.”
What is frustrating, is that pain is actually partially psychological. Some wellness techniques may have an actual, medical, benefit on some patients. The worst thing a conspiracy theorist can have is a point. So now you actually do kinda feel better, and you have a sense of loyalty to the grifter selling you 300$ Sumerian Cock Oil Pills. These people are the core of the wellness industry. They are the examples that everyone else points to and says “Well it worked for them!”
Reactionary thought blooms in environments like this. If the medical industry can’t be trusted, what else can’t be trusted? At any given time, you are two clicks away from “vaccines cause autism.” Three clicks away from “Cavemen were 15 feet tall because they only ate meat.” And four clicks away from “The medical industry is controlled by The Jews to drain our wallets and keep us sick.” Echoes of Nazi attitudes towards German-Jewish doctors are a common backbeat.
Wellness itself is relatively harmless, (compared to the things it is adjacent to) but it acts as a sort of idealogical airport that exposes the curious to a deluge of potentially radicalizing communities. The longer you spend in communities like this, the higher the chance you’ll come across something that meshes perfectly with your own biases.
[Image ID: Tweet from Olivia Hill (@/ machineIV) on 15 Apr 23 reading: The only time my parents brought up sexuality was when my stepdad said, “if you turn gay I promise you they’ll never find your body.”
So no, maybe I don’t think all education about gender and sexuality should come from parents. /End ID]
I wish wizards were real so bad imagine coming out of a wal mart and seeing some guy with long robes and a big hat in the parking lot surrounded by wacky particle effects screaming some shit like “By the moon and the starlight, by the shield and the sword, I summon to me, my Honda Accord!” And then just getting into his car and driving off
was at a tattoo convention today and i saw a guy with a spider-man tattoo so i walked up and went ‘oh dude is that spider-man? badass! i love spider-man!’ and then looked down and realized i was wearing my shirt that says I LOVE SPIDER-MAN in big black letters. i’m a parody of myself
stop calling me a cartoon character or an npc or a wojack i am a real boy.
okay okay so like i don’t wanna kill the party but i just saw an instagram shop selling a shirt that says now i am become death the destroyer of worlds in barbie font and i just sigh i just like i get the novelty of barbie and oppenheimer weekend but i have got to stress the bomb changed the entire world forever and wiped out over a quarter of a million people i think maybe we gotta kinda take a step back here when we start selling it as if it’s fun hot girl summer fodder
before you start babygirling oppenheimer just know that from what i’ve heard the film does not address downwinders, does not have a singular japanese person in it, and exploited our museums by claiming photos on loan for personal use (meaning they did not have to pay a penny to use them in the film despite being a multi-million dollar production).
I’m going to say it, even though it probably has been said. The bomb was tested in New Mexico. Nary a New Mexican has been consulted or the years long environmental consequences that weren’t that much lesser than Japan acknowledged, and people that suffered from the deathly rippling of the bombings are still alive.
inside you, young transmasculine person, is a voice that will tell you not to like certain things because they’re For Girls. that is the voice of the devil, and you must never listen to it.
