The Comfort and the Catch

Wellness culture · Commodification · Striving

On crystals, tarot, and the wellness aesthetic that arrived exactly when we needed it—and what it can cost us to let it in.

April 2026 12 min read

Let me start with something that I hold with some ambivalence: the first time I pulled a tarot card during a particularly brutal stretch of the semester (well, life), something in me exhaled. I did not exhale based on a pure belief that the card was telling me something cosmically true, but because the act of pausing, holding a question, sitting with uncertainty rather than trying to optimize my way through it, and that I could "find" or be told an answer—a form of certainty and a "Truth"—that felt, briefly and genuinely, like relief.

I am a sociologist who studies how wellness culture commodifies transformation, scientifically. I also own a deck of tarot cards. Both things can be "true."

I start here because I think the most honest thing that I can do is resist the easy critique. It would be simple to write an essay that positions crystals and astrology and the whole glittering apparatus of the contemporary wellness aesthetic as pure false consciousness, with capitalism selling people their own alienation back to them in a linen pouch, usually containing a saying that feels so applicable, no matter what (anything related to waves will always seem like legit wisdom for me). There is something to that argument, but it skips over questions that matter more: why does any of this work and what does "work" even mean? What needs does it meet—and meet in a way that feels authentic—that more traditional institutions are failing to address?

The answer, I think, has everything to do with striving culture and the specific vulnerabilities it both creates and sells the answers to in return.

* * *

In the previous essay, I wrote about the unfinishable self: the particular exhaustion deriving from achievement culture due to the way institutions keep the definition of success permanently just out of reach. What I did not write about, but what the women in my research described just as vividly, is what that exhaustion does to the body and to the spirit.

These cultural pressures, which can turn into internalized standards of self, produce a kind of disconnection, reflecting continuations of alienation, including from (1) physical sensation: you stop noticing hunger, thirst (so many trends & apps around drinking water!), tiredness, or the moment your shoulders reached your ears sometime last Tuesday; (2) other people: striving culture is, structurally, isolating, positioning everyone else as competition, distraction, or in a market/hierarchical role (main character energy, "pick me" girl); and (3) meaning: when productivity becomes the metric and the metric keeps moving, it gets harder to remember why you wanted any of this in the first place—yet, you also know that you don't want to give it up (i.e., One-Dimensional Man).

My ongoing research shows how several participants described turning to wellness practices (yoga, journaling, astrology, crystal work) not as some strict spiritual conviction, but rather as a way of recovering access to themselves. One described it as "the only time I'm not trying to produce something." Another said her morning ritual with oracle cards was "the one part of the day that belongs only to me." The practices functioned less as holistic belief systems than as structured permission to be present, unproductive, and unobserved—small, everyday forms of control in a world that can feel as though its spinning utterly out of control.

If you can, marinate on that for a little—do you have your own forms of mini-rituals? Moments of exhale?

I think this relates to one of the more crucial things you can say about the commodified striving culture: systems have removed the permission to be unproductive so thoroughly, structurally, and completely that people need a ritual, a dedicated practice, or an external framework just to access stillness, beingness. The morning oracle card may not primarily be a spiritual practice for many; it can still be a genuine practice, yet the driving force is as a workaround. It represents one thing that we can reach for when an institution has required you to suppress so much of yourself in order to 'perform' that you loose ordinary access to the parts that are not counted towards performance.

What my research participants were describing was not spiritual seeking, at least not only. It was recovery. The wellness practice was doing the restoration work that the system had made necessary—returning access to organic rhythms, creative expression, natural connections, "child-like" faith or whimsy, and intuition that the institution has required them to set aside. It offers (literally) attractive and accessible solutions to things that are otherwise too big to even comprehend; it offers ways to plan, lingo to capture the stuff (waves hand generally in the air) that is otherwise difficult to discuss, and easy community ("I love that bracelet - is it Tiger's Eye?").

Read that way, the appeal of the transformational aesthetic is not mysterious at all. It offers almost precisely the inverse of what striving culture demands:

Where achievement culture asks for productivity, the wellness aesthetic offers ritual: slow, embodied, resistant to quantification.

Where striving isolates, the crystals-and-tarot world offers community, a shared language, a sense of belonging to something with different values.

Where the professional self is always being evaluated, the spiritual self gets to just be.

These are real things—I want to say that clearly before I complicate it. The exhale I described at the beginning of this essay was 'real,' when defined as a genuine, felt sense. This can be difficult to differentiate sociologically, yet it can be nice to admit when you just "know" or "feel" something.

Anyone who has found genuine relief in a morning ritual, a beautifully designed journal, a community of people who speak the language of intuition and energy—that relief is not manufactured, although the need for it very well could be. The felt relief points to something actually missing. This offers the conundrum: one is not at fault for "buying in," yet there could be a greater cost if we do not delve beyond the surface relief and practices—looking towards the deeper why.

Looking more closely at what the wellness aesthetic is actually selling alongside the relief, and you will find something familiar: an identity. Not just a practice, but a particular kind of person who is grounded, intentional, and aligned. Someone who has done the inner work. The transformation script is nearly identical to the one striving culture runs: I was lost, I struggled, I did the work, I arrived—except the destination has changed. Instead of tenure, it is healing. Instead of the corner office, it is the highest self. The arc is the same. The arrival is still the point, which means the wellness aesthetic does not so much reject the logic of transformation completely, as much as rename it. The crystal is a prop in a different performance with the same underlying promise: that if you do enough of the right things, you will eventually become someone who no longer feels the way you currently feel.

The wellness aesthetic did not invent the needs it meets. Striving culture did. The aesthetic was offered at exactly the right moment to sell back the solutions in beautiful packaging.

* * *

Here is where the ambivalence sharpens into something harder.

The transformational aesthetic—the specific cultural formation that turned astrology, tarot, crystals, and the broader vocabulary of New Age spirituality into a multi-billion dollar market—did not simply offer an alternative to striving culture. It absorbed striving culture's logic and repackaged it in more holistic offerings.

Look carefully at how wellness culture talks about these practices and you will find, underneath the language of slowness and presence and intuition, a remarkably familiar structure: self-improvement. The tarot is not just a tool for sitting with uncertainty: it is a tool for unlocking your potential. The crystals do not just sit on your desk: they align your energy for success. The morning ritual is not just a moment of stillness: it is an investment in your highest self.

The productivity logic did not disappear. It got a linen aesthetic and a rose quartz on top.

This matters because of what it does to the original political content of these traditions. Many of the practices that now circulate as wellness commodities have roots in communities—Black and Indigenous communities, queer communities, working-class spiritual traditions—for whom they functioned not as self-optimization tools but as genuine counter-cultural resources. These practices were oriented toward collective meaning-making, surviving systems that were hostile to your existence, and forms of knowledge that institutions refuse to recognize.

Audre Lorde wrote about self-care as an act of political warfare. She was not describing a branded wellness challenge—she was describing survival. The distance between those two things, including between the radical original and the commodified copy, is not incidental. It is the distance between a practice that challenges the system and one that helps you function within it.

What got lost in the commodification was not just the aesthetic of the original practices, but also their rootedness in particular cultural traditions, forms of handmade and homemade quality, and a deliberate distance from consumer culture. Beyond this, what also got lost was their embeddedness in community, shared analysis, and a collective understanding of why certain bodies, in certain systems, needed certain kinds of care.

Lorde's self-care was inseparable from her politics and understanding of what the system was doing, to whom, and why. The practice and the analysis were the same practice. The branded wellness challenge is self-care without naming the system. It offers the ritual without the reckoning and in doing so, it performs exactly the move that striving culture performs: it takes a structural condition, routes it through individual practice, and leaves the structure intact.

Your healing is yours. Your morning ritual is yours. Your crystals are yours. The institution that required the healing in the first place remains, quietly, everyone's.

The distance between Audre Lorde's self-care and a branded wellness challenge is not aesthetic. It is political. One names a system. The other makes the system more bearable—and in doing so, makes it harder to see.

* * *

So where does that leave those of us (including myself) who find real value in these practices while also seeing clearly what has been done to them? 

I don't think the answer is to simply discard them, as that would be its own kind of performativity: the critical theorist who is too sophisticated to be comforted, which is just another form of striving or another identity script with arrival built in. This would ignore the genuine thing the practices offer, such as a different relationship to time, the body, and uncertainty.

Yet, I think we owe it to ourselves to ask the big questions about what we are actually doing when we reach for the crystal, along with what we are not doing. When a wellness practice promises to make you more productive, more successful, more optimized, it has already conceded the terms. It is a latent acceptance that the goal is performance and offers a more sustainable fuel, which is not transformation. Instead, that is maintenance and maintenance, however necessary, is not the same as asking whether the system that requires this much maintenance is one you actually want to inhabit. 

The practices that genuinely resist striving culture are, unfortunately, not the ones with the most beautiful branding. They are the ones that make room for the question underneath the exhaustion, so rather than asking, "How do I manage this better?" the question may be, "Why is this the shape of a life?" That question does not fit in a morning routine, nor is it resolved strictly by a card pull. It requires, at minimum, other people: a community that shares the analysis, not just the aesthetic. A collective that is willing to name the system, not just recover from it. 

This is, I think, what the original traditions were reaching toward and what gets stripped out in the translation to consumer production. What gets excluded is not the ritual or the offered comfort, but the humanized political. The shared reckoning. The understanding that your exhaustion is not yours alone, that the conditions producing it are made and could be unmade, and that the work of addressing them is collective rather than personal. 

That question—whose script is this, and do I want to keep reading from it?—is not one the wellness industry can answer for you, although they will absolutely have an essential oil or unique journal they promise will help. It is not any one industry can answer.

It is, though, the question that this series keeps circling in different forms and from different angles. It will come up again (promise). 

For now: the exhale was real. The need to take care of your self is real. The system that made the need is real, too. Holding all three of those things at once, without resolving them into a tidy thesis, is not a failure of analysis but rather, I think, the most honest place to stand. 

The work to navigate this ambivalence and these tensions may be helped through rituals and meditation, yet cannot fully resolve it. It is, in the fullest sense, a living draft. 

Part of a series

This essay is in conversation with The Unfinishable Self (on achievement anxiety and the structure of striving culture) and You Are Not a Final Draft (on identity, authorship, and the lie of transformation).