Wellness is usually a topic that turns me off. This could be because I have unearthed so many concerning truths about it. But as someone whose job is to monitor the cultural canon and understand youth, it’s hard to avoid it, with nearly one-third of 15 to 30-year-olds in McKinsey’s 2025 Future of Wellness survey saying they’re focusing on wellness a lot more than they were one year ago.
On the surface, that makes sense. In a persistent gloomcycle where chaos is the default, wellness rituals offer a reprieve and control. And in a post-pandemic culture, there is a larger understanding of preventative health care. Right? Well, yes, but these aren’t the primary driving force of this movement.
Having spent a lot of time with 14-22-year-olds over the last 12 months, and watching endless “My Daily Wellness Routine” videos, you’ll see everything is optimised. But more often than not, that same teen hasn’t played a sport for 4 years, hasn’t been to a gym in months, vapes a concerning amount and goes days without leaving the house.
This cohort, Gen Q: the 14-22-year-olds who went through adolescence in lockdown, learned about wellness in isolation; bedroom workouts, meal tracking, and solo optimisation. This is how lockdown adolescence met decades of diet culture, how self-care became performance, how optimisation became politics, and how wellness culture created exactly what it claimed to prevent: shame, isolation, extremism, and surveillance.
A fuller picture of the numbers tells the story. Teens spend less time in organised athletics than any generation before them. Traditional team sports, gym class, and casual physical activity are all trending downward. Yet wellness spending amongst 18-27 year olds is exploding. Gen Q leads every category in the $2 trillion global wellness industry. Between 2023 and 2024, GLP-1 medication use amongst adolescents surged 594%.
But what if I tell you there is a rebellion emerging; the anarchists proving you don’t need to optimise everything and have always been documenting it to actually live well.
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