The wellness industry is worth trillions of dollars globally. Meditation apps, executive coaches, sleep trackers, and corporate mindfulness programmes have proliferated in recent decades, particularly in professional environments. But a growing body of critical scholarship questions whether this therapeutic culture addresses the actual causes of poor health and unhappiness at work — or merely helps individuals tolerate conditions that should be changed.

From a structural determinants perspective, wellbeing is not primarily a matter of personal habits. It is shaped by income, housing, job security, and systemic inequality. Precarious employment — zero-hours contracts, gig work, and chronic job insecurity — is associated with significantly worse mental and physical health outcomes than stable employment, regardless of individual lifestyle choices.

The medicalisation of workplace distress is particularly contentious. When burnout, anxiety, or disengagement are framed as individual psychological problems requiring therapeutic intervention, the structural conditions that produce them — excessive workloads, toxic management, neoliberal pressure to perform — tend to go unexamined. The result is that the burden of adaptation falls on the worker, not the organisation.

This does not mean that individual agency is irrelevant. But it does mean that celebrating resilience and mindfulness as solutions to structurally produced suffering can function as a form of ideological misdirection — one that happens to be very profitable for the wellness industry.

A more honest conversation about health and work would require engaging with labour market flexibility, the erosion of workers' rights, and the distribution of power between employers and employees. These are political questions, and wellness culture, by design, tends to depoliticise them.