Your yoga mat, your smoothie, and the ethical hangover.
Sophia Chen, Staff Writer
I HAVE gained consciousness twice: first as a hedonistic child, then again after learning in grade school that we are all made of atoms. The second time left me wondering why anything matters for us at all if we are merely collections of particles, briefly self-aware.
This article aims to answer a question I’ve held ever since then: Why care about ethics and the consequences of our actions as long as we can pass our existences blissfully with meaningless pleasures like the Axiom humans in Wall-E?
Buying Your Way Out of Loneliness
A plethora of dull critiques on consumerism can already be found online. Recession-indicators like the Lipstick Index have become enshrined in common knowledge and influencers are celebrating underconsumption as the latest trend.
These ideas show that buyers are aware of how the wellness industry advertises ways to fulfill the emptiness of hyper-consumerism, even as it contributes to this very consumerism. Yet, people continue to buy expensive wellness products amid an era of economic precarity.
In 2024, global health club memberships reached 77 million, marking a 6% year-over-year increase, while club visits rose 8%. Even as political violence rises across the world, revenue for the wellness sector has grown an average of 8% across nearly 30 markets, driven by demand for personalized wellness services including yoga, recovery therapies, and mental health integration.
As a woman does, I attended a free Sweat & Tonic trial class with a fellow Trinity Times staff writer some months ago. Sweat & Tonic (S&T) is a Toronto-based boutique fitness studio that markets itself as more than just a gym. It’s also a “sweat, recover, connect” hub with a variety of classes like yoga, HIIT, Pilates, and indoor cycling. Classes are purchasable for a fluctuating number of credits on the company’s website, like in a game with currency that you can buy with real money.
In the darkness of the hot “Immersive Beat Ride” biking room, over 50 people clicked their provided shoes onto rows of stationary bikes while EDM blasted from speakers behind blinding LED strobe lights. One instructor faced the crowd, lit white by green and purple beams, while the rest of us prepared to ride in sync, immersed in a sweaty darkness.
Over the course of the 45-minute class, the instructor chose members from our crowd to ride at the front with her for one EDM song at a time. These chosen students were called up by name to be applauded and thanked for their loyalty to the workout programs.
Attending this trial class and seeing the high participation reminded me of a high school pep rally—or a cult. Perhaps the class was like a combination of both with how it quenched a thirst for community that I didn’t even know I had.
If I hadn’t gone with a friend, or if I didn’t care about the somewhat unethical atmosphere of their business model, I probably would’ve returned for more. I say unethical because community rope-in business models, although a classic tactic in the fitness industry, cross into manipulative territory when they prey on loneliness or FOMO. At $250+/month for a regular membership to Sweat & Tonic, you’re essentially paying for what could be a free running club or Meetup group, plus some communal mats and mirrors.
Empirical insights suggest this exorbitant spending on “wellness” experiences serves as a psychological buffer. Amid geopolitical uncertainties, consumers are increasingly favouring experiences over products, with wellness positioned as a status-driven antidote to broader chaos.
During my trial class, I also noticed that the instructor employed a specific type of language that taps into insecurity like a high school bully might, subtly putting you down before selling you an easy path to social success: buying more classes.
Reclaiming the Language of Wellness Culture
Among other overused pseudo-scientific terms in the language of wellness, one particularly memorable phrase our S&T instructor yelled was to push past our “limiting self-beliefs” by biking past them.
In this context, limiting self-beliefs refer to any negative, restrictive self-assumptions that might hinder our personal growth. The term is a simplified echo of a philosophy co-opted by corporate industry to use as a pseudo-scientific, marketable commodity. The concept of limiting self-beliefs has formed the basis of a myriad of for-profit books, online courses, coaching programs, and seminars. These enterprises repackage overcoming self-beliefs as simplistic “manifestation”—quick fixes that promise rapid transformation while ignoring systemic or societal factors.
As such, believing in delusional self-belief as a pathway to wealth or other personal success often leads to avoidance behaviours, such as endless reading instead of action. Unrealistic expectations from these beliefs (e.g., “if he wanted to, he would”; or “Looksmaxxing”) also trap consumers in cycles of temporary highs followed by disillusionment, which serve as right-wing pipelines into politically extreme communities like the manosphere.
To rectify and reclaim the language of wellness culture, we should start by emphasizing collective care over consumerism, using ethical and mindful approaches to make wellness accessible, inclusive, and resistant to capitalist co-optation. Movements like “buy local” or “slow living” cross ideological lines. In 2024, 46% of U.S. consumers reported prioritizing sustainable products as a way to reduce their impact on the environment, spanning political affiliations.
What Does Ethical Consumption Even Mean?
Ethical consumption is simpler than it seems. It means choosing wellness resources that value sustainability, cultural respect, and fair labour, while reducing overall purchases to avoid feeding the industry’s exploitative cycle.
This shifts self-help language from “buy your way to happiness” to “invest in equitable systems,” through everyday choices such as:
- Choosing fair-trade coffee
- Supporting local businesses, restaurants, bakeries
- Shopping second-hand
- Researching into what you’re buying (the Boycott Israel list is a good resource)
Most importantly, don’t buy what you don’t need. Studies show that consuming less is linked to greater well-being, freeing mental energy from consumerist pressures and fostering intrinsic fulfillment. Instead of purchasing wellness, the most effective self-care comes through low-cost practices: journaling, joining a book club, or accessing self-help materials from public-domain libraries—all for free.
An Amputation of Life’s Pleasures? The Tragedy of Apathy
Even with these options laid out, increasing ethical consumption can still feel daunting when unethical products are so ingrained in daily life. Does that mean I have to throw everything away to be truly ethical?
We only have so many senses to enjoy what the world offers. Even if Starbucks lobbies against worker unions while feigning support, and Amazon’s AWS servers aid Israeli military intelligence in tracking nearly everyone in Gaza, do I not still have the right to my caramel macchiato or an online shopping spree if I can afford it?
Where do we draw the line between ethical responsibility and amputating life’s pleasures in a world built on others’ suffering?
I empathize with sentiments like “it’s too hard” or “I can’t do this without it feeling performative” because these hurdles stem from real emotional and structural knots—echoing a Humean point on self-belief that fear of failure, exclusion, or loss can chain reason in place.
Though I reject the “overcoming your limiting beliefs” mantra pushed by wellness influencers and self-help gurus, I still find merit in phrases like Nike’s “Just Do It,” inspired by death row inmate Gary Gilmore’s last words. Despite their unethical roots, perhaps we can still reclaim some value from the wellness industry’s self-help sludge.
An Impulsive Life Decision: To Just Do It
This was the mindset I held when I went vegan last July. While texting a friend about travel ethics during my study abroad in Singapore, I suddenly decided to stop eating animal products out of concern for the environment, violence, and human welfare.
Before going vegan, whenever I had to process a raw slab of meat, cognitive dissonance helped me ignore animal suffering. As such, I frankly couldn’t have cared less about the tragic fates of chickens in slaughterhouses or baby cows separated from their mothers who are milked by Fairlife in dirty plastic blue tubs. What clicked for me over the summer was how our apathy toward ethical consumption sustains corporate oppression, wealth inequality, and violence on a global scale.
In Singapore, I saw it walking from the polished marble of ION Orchard to the dim corridors of Lucky Plaza lined with second-hand shops and phone repair stalls. Across both spaces, everyone seemed to be a migrant from somewhere else. Yet, the class divide between worker and “ex-pat” felt more visible because the migrant workers hadn’t been tucked out of sight by stretches of farmland like in Canada.
A bigger picture of these wealth disparities are prevalent on a global scale. From our privileged positions as consumers, we may feel that boycotting unethical companies can amputate life’s pleasures—but exploitative industries like fast fashion have caused real bodily harm and mutilation for workers in the countries producing our goods.
Famously, the neglect-induced deaths of 1,134 factory workers in the Rana Plaza disaster of 2013 have led to widespread outcry against overconsumption in the past decade. However, people still buy fast fashion today. As a $150.82 billion industry, fast fashion has actually grown by 10.74% from 2024 and is further estimated to reach $291.1 billion by 2032. These figures disappoint me, but also drive my conviction to stop feeding these statistics.
Why care about ethics if we’re all going to die?
Even in a universe racing toward oblivion, our craving for community and meaning endures—seen in how we binge on fast fashion to join microtrend identities or buy into exploitative gym models that prey on our need for belonging. Ethics aren’t a cosmic mandate but a practical response to this human desire.
If you feel guilty about buying from unethical sources, choose to stop. For me, veganism embodies that choice: not ascetic restraint, but the joy of mindful consumption and discovering plant-based alternatives in the world’s sixth most vegan-friendly city. We are all free to live as we wish, but only ethics make that freedom worth sharing.
