The Words We Lost

Years ago, over dinner among colleagues, a man my age (late 50s), solid business experience, no healthcare training, asked me plainly what my problem was with the word wellness.

He wasn’t hostile. He was genuinely puzzled, the way you’d be puzzled if someone told you they objected to the word good. The long table went quiet to hear my answer. And I could feel the shape of that silence—the sense that I was about to challenge something everyone else found pleasant, obvious, and not incidentally, abundantly profitable.

That silence taught me something the market depends on. The benevolent air of the word is the product. If wellness sounds like an unarguable good, then questioning it sounds like questioning health itself, and almost no one will risk it.

I’ve spent more than twenty years working in a field the world insists on calling wellness. I still flinch a little every time I hear the word.

Clearly it isn’t health I object to. I’ve built a whole life around it.

The work was never glamorous. For years I sat across from people whose bodies were trying to reveal a truth almost nobody could understand—the inflammation that seemed to have no reason, the symptom that didn’t fit the formula. I learned to listen in a way that allowed me to hear what these bodies were saying. What they’d been screaming to other practitioners for years. Later, I spent more than a decade teaching other practitioners to listen the same way.

The books that shaped how I think are on the shelf behind me as I write: Gabor Maté and Atul Gawande, Arthur Frank, Kathryn Mannix, Rita Charon, and so many more. Some I’ve leaned on, some I argue with. None of them sits under wellness, and every one is about a body that keeps an ongoing record of the life lived in it.

And I tend my own body, mostly unglamorously. I stopped negotiating around sleep years ago and honor a strict bedtime. I keep my blood sugar steady because everything else rides on it. I move with intention most days, I hydrate regularly, and I pay attention to the quality of my poop, a topic no one wants to raise at dinner and which tells me more than most lab panels ever could. What holds me up doesn’t come in a bottle. Love, work that means something, the joy I’ve learned I have to make deliberate room for. I have my indulgences too, a few things on the shelf I can’t necessarily defend to a journal reviewer. And yet the basics that actually keep a body upright are mostly plain, mostly free, and mostly things I had to relearn the hard way. I turned sixty this past week. I’m not writing about any of this from a safe distance. I’m writing from inside it—as a post-menopausal woman who’s experienced significant chronic stress, manages an autoimmune condition, and wants to protect my health for as long as possible.

But the word wellness arrives carrying a cringe I’ve never been able to name. A faint scent of the boutique. The membership tier. The seventeen-dollar adaptogenic latte photographed from above, bee pollen sprinkled around its rim. Say wellness to most of the women I sit with— educated women who read and think and have run their own lives competently for decades— and you can watch a small, complicated weather pass over their face. Part aspiration. Part fatigue. Part suspicion, never quite spoken, that they are about to be sold to again.

And then there are the women for whom no weather passes at all. The word lands as plainly as air or water. They’re so far inside it there’s no edge left to feel—the way a fish has no word for water.

Of course wellness. What else would you call it?

That untroubled faith is its own kind of evidence. The ideology is most complete in the people who can’t even feel it working.

But that weather is worth paying attention to. Because the discomfort doesn’t belong to the woman feeling the pull of the marketing or living inside of it so fully that she can’t tell it’s there.

It belongs to the word.

The strange thing about wellness is that in some ways it seems ancient. It has the plain, sturdy sound of an English word that has always been with us, like rest or bread or health. It’s actually younger than you think. Younger than your grandmother. We treat it as inheritance. But it’s closer to a product launch.

Before the word wellness arrived, we had a much older and far richer vocabulary for the thing we were actually reaching for—words that named a condition of being, not a category of spending.

Long before there was wellness, the Greeks had eudaimonia.

We usually translate it as happiness, which is almost entirely wrong. The word breaks down to eu, good, and daimon, spirit. Aristotle was careful to say that eudaimonia was not a feeling and not a mood. It was an activity. The activity of a soul living well across a whole life, in accordance with virtue, inside a community. You couldn’t feel eudaimonia on a Wednesday and lose it by Saturday. You could not buy it. You could only live your way into it, over years, among other people, by the actual shape of how you spent your days.

“For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.”

― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

The Hebrew language had shalom.

We translate that one as peace, which is also too thin. The root carries wholeness, completeness, soundness, things being knit back into their right relationship. Shalom is not explained as the absence of conflict. It’s the presence of integration—between a person and her neighbor, her work, her own divided self. What matters most, for our purposes, is that shalom was never private. It described a web before it ever described a person. You could not be whole alone, because wholeness was a property of the whole.

English, eventually, gave us well-being. Something more interior. More modern. Connected to a unique being. But still a state you inhabited rather than a kit you assembled or a series of supplements you stacked. To be well in one’s being—even in its individuality—pointed at a condition of the whole person, not a score on a panel.

And underneath even that, in the simplest word we have, the same idea was waiting all along. Health comes from the Old English hāl: whole. The same root runs through hale, and heal, and whole itself.

Each of those older words held something the new one would lose. They held relationship. They held time. They held the unspoken understanding that a single body, on its own, or in its parts, is never the whole unit of measurement. The good life was something that happened between people and across a lifespan. It was woven, not hacked.

To be healthy was to be entire, undivided, sound all the way through. Respected.

Wholeness was sitting in the language the entire time. We let it slip into wellness and stopped hearing the difference. We traded it all in for a word you can shop.

In the 1950s, an American physician named Halbert Dunn began giving lectures on something he called high-level wellness. In 1961 he gathered his speeches into a slim book with the same title. His idea was actually closer to the old words than to what came after. Dunn meant an integrated, dynamic process. A direction of travel rather than a destination. He was reaching, in his own midcentury way, toward something like flourishing.

“[Wellness is…] an integrated method of functioning which is oriented to maximizing the potential of which an individual is capable, within the environment where he is functioning.”

— Halbert Dunn, High Level Wellness

But the word got loose.

In 1975, a young doctor named John Travis opened the first Wellness Resource Center in Mill Valley, California. Don Ardell published his own High Level Wellness in 1977. The fitness boom arrived. Then the spas, the retreats, the supplements, the newsletters, the apps. By the time most of us were paying attention, wellness had been translated from a state you live, into a thing you buy. Into an industry, with products, and profits, and shareholders. The Global Wellness Institute now puts the wellness industry at six-point-eight trillion dollars—nearly four times the size of the pharmaceutical industry. A number that size means someone is doing very well. One question worth considering is whether it’s the same someone the word was supposed to be about.

Anything built to be sold eventually sorts its buyers, and the wellness industry sorted them by what they could spend. Customers are not the same as people. The thing the old words had described as everyone’s birthright—flourishing, wholeness, a life lived well among others—became a tier. GOOP sells a candle and a jade egg and a four-figure “wellness summit” ticket, and the word does its quiet work: if you can’t buy in, the failure reads as yours. Whole communities got left outside a model that was named, with no apparent irony, after the most universal thing there is. Health is supposed to be the one inheritance no one can be priced out of. Wellness made sure plenty of people were.

So, the bone I have to pick isn’t with the idea, or with Dunn, who was reaching for something real. It’s with the translation—the moment the word stopped describing a foundational way of being and started describing a way of spending. And the genius of the new version is that you never arrive. The goal keeps moving just far enough ahead to keep you buying.

It takes your attention as much as your money—the morning spent calculating protein, the evening lost to the forum, the background hum running while you decide what you’re allowed to eat.

A body cannot be separated from the life lived inside it.

Here is what slipped through our fingers in the move from eudaimonia and shalom and wholeness to wellness. The relationships went first. Then the community. Then the longitudinal arc of a life, the sense that a body is something you live into over decades, not a score you post this quarter. And then a quieter loss, harder to notice because it happens on the inside: the ability to feel your own body and trust what you find there. To know you’re tired without an app confirming it. To register hunger, or grief, or enough, from the inside.

And underneath even that, the rupture that produced all the others. The older words knew a body cannot be separated from the life lived inside it. Shalom held the body and the relationships in a single frame. Eudaimonia held the body and the years and the community at once. Sever that, set the body apart from the life it has been living, and everything else follows. The numbness. The outsourcing. The persistent sense of always falling short. And here is the part that costs the most. Once the body is cut off from its context, you can no longer read it on your own. You have to relearn it from the outside, one purchase at a time—buying back, in scoops and subscriptions and lab panels, the fluency you were born with. That is the most expensive loss, and the one no one sends you a bill for.

What remains is the individual woman, standing alone with her choices, holding a basket of products and a low, persistent hum that her health is a personal performance she is somehow always failing.

I hear it in some form or another every week. I ask whether you’re hydrated and you tell me which electrolyte you take. I ask how you slept and you tell me what your sleep score was, or which magnesium you’ve switched to. I ask what happened in your body when the hard news came and you tell me you’ve been doing breathwork for your vagus nerve. Every question I ask about sensation comes back as a purchase. The messages from our body fell silent, and we let the shopping list answer in its place.

This is not an accident of language or the industry. It’s the whole architecture.

When flourishing was eudaimonia, your inability to flourish might implicate your city, your relationships, the fairness of the arrangements you were living inside. All the social constructs considered as a part of the whole. The failure was not yours alone to carry, and the remedy was not for sale.

When the same difficulty gets renamed as a wellness problem, something shifts. The failure becomes personal. The cause becomes your discipline, your morning routine, your willpower, or your choices at the supplement aisle in the health food store. And the remedy, conveniently, is always available for purchase by midnight.

That is a profitable rearrangement. That rearrangement is worth six-point-eight trillion dollars. It moves the blame off the systems a woman lives inside and onto the woman herself. The systems that shaped her health are never named, and never charged. The word wellness does this so smoothly that we mistake it for common sense. Wellness sounds like care. But it often functions as a way of selling people back the wholeness that was never actually theirs to lose.

Wellness pulls the body out of the web shalom held, the lifetime eudaimonia named, and sets it on a scale, a tracker, a quarterly test, as if it were a machine to be tuned rather than a record of everything a person has survived.

It treats the body as a project. The body is not a project. It is a witness.

Earlier this year I visited my son in Tokyo, where he’s been living for the past year. The culture seems to run on a different logic at every level. Like a parallel universe.

And while walking, exploring, witnessing, and, of course, eating, I noticed that health, aging, and care all seemed threaded differently through their society. No one was talking about creatine or collagen. The convenience stores sold freshly made rice balls and miso and real food at real prices, not a wall of pre-packaged protein bars promising your daily dose. Older people were out and about, in the markets and metro, unremarkable, part of the day rather than an inspirational exception. The whole atmosphere ran quieter, and what it seemed to prize was comfort and continuity over performative intensity. The language was hard to grasp, and harder still to put through a literal translation, but I started exploring some of their words for clues.

The word genki (元気) is usually translated as health, or energy, or vigor, but its literal meaning runs closer to original spirit, or primary energy. The word lives mostly in the spaces between people who already know each other. You might ask family or an old friend: Genki datta?— roughly, Have you been well? Past tense. The way you’d ask after someone whose life you’ve been absent from for a bit.

The kanji themselves carry something deeper. Gen for origin, or source. Ki for the breath, the spirit, the animating energy that runs through everything. To be genki is to have your original energy intact, to be moving through the day as the spirit you were given. The personal greeting is a recognition of life force, exchanged between two people who understand themselves as continuous with what is alive around them.

What you would not do is ask Genki datta? of a stranger. There is no Japanese reflex for the American How are you?—the one we toss at the barista and the seatmate and the person at yoga whose name we’ve already forgotten. The question that warrants no answer.

Genki is more specific. You can only ask after someone’s original energy if you have some reason to know it. The word can’t flatten into small talk, because the thing it names isn’t small, and isn’t talk.

It’s curious to me what this implies about our own customs, our language, the word we’ve been turning over. Wellness asks nothing of anyone but you. You can pursue it alone, buy it alone, fail at it alone, and never need another person in the room. Genki can’t be held alone. It names a state you can only have, and only ask after, in relationship. Same territory, opposite architecture. One word made health a private endeavor. The other never stopped treating it as something that lives between us.

Japanese seems to have its own deep vocabulary for living well—genki, kenkō for health, ikigai for the reason you get up in the morning, iyashi for healing and rest. What it does not seem to have is a word for wellness. A culture fluent in a dozen ways to name a life well lived had no native word for the thing we sell.

Ironically, we study these islands for their longevity. We chart their centenarians, copy their diets, package their habits into protocols and sell them back at a markup. The culture we most want to emulate never needed the thing we’re selling. They were never doing wellness. And I felt this. They were just living in a way we’ve since had to invent an industry to recommend.

I am not writing this to indict the woman who lights the candle, takes the probiotic, books the retreat she has earned ten times over. I am that woman, too—I have my rituals and my hopes pinned to things I can’t always defend. There is nothing wrong with care, with attention, with wanting to feel like yourself in a changing body. The instinct underneath the wellness economy is real, and it’s exactly the instinct the industry has learned to keep slightly hungry.

The point is not to feel guilty about the word, your identification with it, or to perform some purer relationship to your own health. The point is to notice how much the word leaves out. To feel the difference between I am failing at my wellness and I have been handed a vocabulary built to make me feel that way.

That dinner, where I was first asked to name my problem with the word wellness, is years behind me now. I’ve since left the table for good. The work I was protecting that night could only stay itself for so long inside a place that wanted something else from it. But I’ve kept the question that dinner cracked open. Not his question—mine. What do we actually mean by the word? And what did we trade away with that meaning?

If I was asked that question again, tonight, I wouldn’t reach for a complaint about essential oils or mushroom coffee or high-priced program tickets that don’t deliver. I’d tell him the word is too small. That it took something our oldest languages knew—that to be well is to be whole and no one is whole alone—and shrank it to a thing you buy by yourself, at midnight, and fail at by morning.

And I’d tell him the part the word is built to hide. That no one is whole in a place that requires them to be smaller than they are. You cannot supplement your way to wholeness inside a life that doesn’t fit, or a room that doesn’t respect you, or a system that needs your doubt to stay in business. The body registers misalignment as surely as it registers a nutrient, and no protocol overrides it. That’s the part wellness can never sell, because the remedy isn’t for sale and it isn’t yours alone to administer. Sometimes being well means changing the conditions, not the regimen.

And I’d tell him there are cultures that never needed the word at all, and that those are the ones we cross the world to study.

Then I’d say the part he might not expect. That I’m not against any of it. That I want for you, for him and his family, and for myself, the oldest version of the thing. Health in the sense the word used to carry, whole and entire and sound all the way through. Less a number to chase than a life to inhabit, in the company of everyone and everything it has always been connected to.

That version was never for sale. Which is the only reason it’s still yours to claim.

Further reading:

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics—the foundational text on eudaimonia.

Halbert Dunn, High-Level Wellness (Beatty, 1961)—the book that introduced the modern American concept of wellness.

Global Wellness Institute, Global Wellness Economy Monitor 2025—the current industry figures.

Margaret Lock, Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America (University of California Press, 1993).

Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be (Eerdmans, 1995).

Note on the writers I name in the piece: Gabor Maté, Atul Gawande, Arthur Frank, Kathryn Mannix, and Rita Charon–each is worth following on their own terms.