Are we seeking Wellness Aesthetics or a Life of Wellness?

I have been thinking about true meaning of wellness as each of us seek balance and clarity in an ever changing world. One thing is becoming clear: wellness has a few aesthetics. It is either one that you can stage, edit, or post. You know, the aesthetic with smooth morning routines, color‑coded planners, gym clips, soft‑life vlogs, and perfectly timed affirmations can make it seem like mental health is a look you wear instead of a life that you live. Aesthetic wellness says, “Look like you have it together and you are okay.”

When Wellness Becomes a Performance

In a world where mental health care is increasingly corporatized and optimized, social media has become a kind of public-facing clinic where wellness is sold through aesthetics. You see soft-life reels, productivity hacks, affirmation boards, and “that girl” routines—laundry folded, journals filled, smoothies blended, calendars color-coded. The feeds are bright, smooth, aspirational.Algorithms reward polished, upbeat content. Posts that are nuanced, politically honest, or simply raw often sink quietly out of view. That constant stream of curated “wellness” teaches a subtle lesson: that mental health looks like calm, pretty, and productive; that “doing well” means looking well. Over time, it becomes easy to confuse how life appears on a screen with how life actually feels in a body.

The Quiet Violence of Toxic Positivity

This is where toxic positivity takes root. It whispers that good vibes, gratitude, and manifesting are the main markers of psychological health, and that grief, rage, numbness, or ambivalence are signs of failure. If you still feel stuck, sad, angry, or exhausted after journaling, meditating, or repeating affirmations, the story says the problem is you. You did not think positively enough or that you weren’t spiritually advanced enough.

Now imagine scrolling while juggling unpaid bills, racial trauma, disability, caregiving, or community violence. Your body is carrying real stress, and your nervous system is doing its level best just to get you through your day. Then your feed tells you that ease, glow, and constant alignment are the new standard and that apparently you are not properly aligned. It’s easy to internalize the idea that your suffering is a branding flaw instead of a response to very real conditions. The pain becomes not only heavy, but shameful.

When Soft Life and Bootstrap Narratives Hurt

On the surface, “soft life” or wellness aesthetics can look like a rebellion against grind culture. I want to be clear: There is genuine wisdom in choosing rest. Choosing pleasure, and nervous system safety in a world that has profited from burnout, especially for Black, Brown, and other marginalized communities is paramount. However, the soft life that is often seen online is built around consumption: travel, spa days, meticulous skincare, and curated spaces. When soft life is equated with luxury and leisure, those without that level of access can end up feeling more defective, instead of free. Your exhaustion, survival-mode coping, and dependence on community can start to feel like proof that you are failing at ease.

In addition, bootstrap messages such as “just work harder,” “heal yourself,” “choose positivity”—erase systemic racism, economic precarity, disability, and intergenerational trauma. They mirror a corporatized mental health logic that says if you’re struggling, you simply have not optimized yourself enough nor have you utilized your "pain" for grind.For many BIPOC clients, this lands on top of a lifetime of messages: be strong, be quiet, don’t make others uncomfortable, be grateful, be resilient. Pain must be minimized or optimized. Spirituality and culture must be sanitized to be “acceptable.” Anger at injustice gets labeled as a problem to fix rather than a sign that your moral and relational intelligence are intact. That is not healing; it is erasure dressed up as self-improvement.

Wealth-Building as a Mental Health Aesthetic

Wealth-building and “thinking smarter” have become their own kind of mental health aesthetic. Investing becomes an identity. “Money mindset” becomes a moral measure. Every choice is framed as optimization. There is real power in financial skills and strategy, especially for communities systematically shut out of generational wealth. But when this becomes a brand, another subtle message creeps in:If you are still in low-wage work, still in debt, still in unsafe housing, still trying to climb out of long-standing structural obstacles, it must be because you’re not thinking smart enough. Not disciplined enough. Not healed enough. For people already shouldering racism, classism, disability, and caregiving, this is one more quiet accusation: if your life doesn’t look like curated wealth, you must be doing healing wrong.

Process says, “You are allowed to be in motion and still be worthy.” Aesthetic wellness treats feelings as props; process treats them as information. One is about appearing transformed. The other is about staying with yourself while you change, even when no one sees it and there’s nothing to post.

Life is in the process because you are in the process. You were never meant to be a finished product. Your nervous system, relationships, grief, joy, and growth all move in cycles: ebb and flow, opening and closing, clarity and confusion. When you stop measuring your healing by how it looks and start honoring what you’re actually living through, you step out of performance and back into relationship with your real life. Let aesthetics be optional, something you might enjoy, play with, or ignore, but do not mistake them for the process of life.

The work is in your daily choices, your body’s quiet yes and no, your willingness to feel, to rest, to repair, to try again. Wellness aesthetics aren’t healing. Life is in the process, and so are you.Wealth‑building and “thinking smarter” have become their own mental health aesthetics, sitting alongside soft life, productivity, and bootstrap narratives as branded versions of what a “good” or “successful” life should look like. When these ideas are flattened into content, investing as identity, “money mindset,” constant optimization, they can imply that people who can’t escape low‑wage work, debt, or unsafe conditions are simply not thinking smart enough, instead of recognizing the weight of structural realities and generational harm. For those already navigating racism, classism, disability, or caregiving, this becomes another quiet accusation: if your life doesn’t look like strategic wealth curation, you must be doing healing wrong. All of these aesthetics: soft life, hustle, bootstrap, wealth‑building, “high value,” and many spiritual or wellness brands, contain pieces of real wisdom. Learning to manage money, rest, set boundaries, or think strategically about work and relationships can be profoundly protective, especially for communities systematically excluded from resources and safety. The problem isn’t that these practices exist; it is that they are packaged as fixed identities and visual performances, ripped from context, then held up as universal standards for what “healed,” “aligned,” or “elevated” should look like.There are, importantly, counter‑aesthetics that affirm simply being yourself: spaces that normalize messy apartments, grief, ambivalence, neurodivergence, disability aging, and not having money as part of a valid human life. These communities push back against the idea that worth is measured by aesthetic coherence, and instead center honesty and “enoughness.” However, beneath all of this is a truth that doesn’t trend easily: life ebbs and flows. No aesthetic, soft life, hustle, wealth, aging, etc. can “authenticity”, can cancel the cyclical nature of being human.

There will be seasons of expansion and contraction, clarity and confusion, abundance and scarcity. Real mental health work is less about locking into one identity and more about building the capacity to ride those cycles: to grieve without condemning yourself, to feel joy without needing to prove it, to pause or push when needed without turning either into a brand.

Accepting this ebb and flow means shifting from “I must become this aesthetic” to “I am a person in process.” It means using tools like planning, therapy, spiritual practice, community, or financial literacy as supports, not auditions for worthiness.

Trusting the process is not passive; it is an active, ongoing relationship with change: returning to your values, repairing when harm is done, adjusting when circumstances shift, and allowing who you are to be bigger than anything you can post or perform.In that frame, aesthetics become optional languages for expression, not requirements for belonging. Healing becomes less about curating a life that looks good and more about inhabiting a life that feels honest, connected, and livable, a life where you are allowed to be unfinished, in motion, and fully human.

motion moves through a human nervous system. Just as the cosmos is full of expansions, collisions, orbits, and slow dissolving, an inner life is full of openings, impacts, patterns, and releases over time. Periods of insight or relief are like expansion; conflict, loss, or crisis are like collision; daily habits and long-term relationships are like orbit; grief work and letting go are like gradual dissolving that makes space for something new.In nature, no ecosystem is static—forests burn and regrow, rivers shift course, seasons turn. Mental health follows a similar ecology: there are times of apparent stillness where roots are growing underground, times of sudden storm or rupture, and times of blossoming that come only because those prior changes happened. Seeing your inner world this way reframes distress as part of a living system adapting, not as proof that you are broken.When mental health is understood as living motion inside a moving cosmos, the goal shifts. Instead of trying to become a fixed, polished version of yourself, the work becomes learning how to stay in relationship with your own changing experience, grounded enough to weather the storms, flexible enough to grow when new light appears, and compassionate enough to recognize that you are part of a much larger pattern of ongoing becoming. make this more concise

Motion moves through the human nervous system just as it moves through the cosmos. An inner life has its own expansions, collisions, orbits, and dissolvings: moments of insight or relief expand you; conflict, loss, or crisis collide with you; daily habits and long-term relationships keep you in orbit; grief and letting go slowly dissolve what was to make room for what is becoming.

Like nature, where forests burn and regrow, rivers shift, and seasons turn, mental health is an ecology, not a snapshot. Periods of distress, numbness, or confusion can be understood as a living system adapting, not as proof that you are broken.

When mental health is seen as living motion inside a moving cosmos, the aim is no longer to become a fixed, polished self. The work becomes staying in relationship with your own changing experience, grounded enough to weather storms, flexible enough to grow toward new light, and compassionate enough to remember that you are part of a much larger pattern of ongoing becoming.