Wellness Over the Years

I have posted my annoyance with the Wellness concept, especially the wasted time at the hospital (your tax dollars at work) several times over the years.  It's hard to choose just one, so I will choose one and link to the others.

This was the first, posted June 2006.  It has a few elements I had forgotten about but still like. 

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Today was the Wellness Fair at work. Foot massage, Reiki, healthful snacks, little games that remind you to wash your hands… your tax dollars at work! But they’re only trying to help, right? It’s good information, that will be good for you. Don’t you think it’s a good thing to be healthy? You aren’t against wellness, are you?

Maybe. I’m more concerned about a half-dozen other types of wellness: cultural wellness, spiritual wellness, familial wellness. Intellect, citizenship - I think the list might go on for quite awhile before I got to body wellness. Time spent working on one is time taken from the others.

Wouldn’t people find it just a bit intrusive if me ‘n’ my pals spent a lot of the state’s money to put together our views on how folks should improve themselves culturally or religiously, then took over the hospital lobby for a day to accost people as they went by? Did you know that you could read four books by C. S. Lewis in the same time as it takes to read The DaVinci Code? That you burn more calories praying on your knees than you do meditating?

Citizenship Wellness. Little booths that quiz you on the Bill of Rights. Book tables with Hitchens Why Orwell Still Matters, or O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores sold at a discount. Flip charts with Ten Things You Can Do To Protect the Constitution.

No, it’s body-worship that’s their national religion now, with considerable overlap on the environmentalist side. Oodles of Good Intentions, hovering to opportunistically strike whenever there’s an opening to tell other folks how to live.

But it’s just good, helpful information on how to be healthy. I don’t see what your problem is.

No, I’m sure you don’t. 

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Wellness Goes Green from 2008

 Wellness Fair - Body Worship - from 2010

Wellness measures - Cost lots of money, with no measurable benefit.  I'm shocked, really.  From 2013

Wellness Again - From 2023