The modern day god is the optimized self
"God" today is what consumes most of our energy. Think money, sex, work, our phones, or increasingly, the optimized self.
The meaning of "worship" now exists far beyond religious contexts.
This past year I did a spending audit, i.e. saw where I spent most of my money, & 80% of my paycheck flowed directly into the wellness industrial complex:
A destination Equinox membership
Bi-weekly sauna/cold plunge experiences (shout-out Othership)
Daily Whole Foods hauls
Supplement & arbitrary health subscriptions like cymbiotika, coconut cult, protein powders, collagens, adaptogens, etc.
Expensive yoga classes
Acupuncture sessions
Gadgets like red light therapy masks, gua shas, an oura ring, etc.
Diagnostic subscriptions like
Yearly wellness retreats
...the list goes on
My goal through the audit was finding a career passion, which manically pointed to wellness.
I'm not devoted to a single practice, I subscribe to a rather polytheistic mental model of wellness than monotheistic. Less faithful disciple, more ‘venture capitalist’ hedging positions to maximize returns on wellbeing.
Wellness culture has incrementally replicated the structures, language, & psychological mechanisms of religious systems, creating a secular faith with its own dogmas, priests, & penitential systems.
The $6 trillion global wellness industry has now colonized the psychological territory once occupied by religion.
Digital Confession Culture
The Before-and-After is a redemption narrative. Religious conversion testimonies follow a consistent structure: life in sin, moment of realization, transformation through faith, & new life of virtue.
Wellness testimonies replicate this formula remarkably:
The sinful past: People reject their former selves, condemned for eating processed food, living sedentary lives, & harboring negative thoughts.
The awakening: A jarring turning point. Think health crises, emotional breakdown, a sudden awareness of their own mortality.. or maybe they’re just not getting laid.
The intervention: They discover salvation through a charismatic influencer or community who guides their conversion.
The salvation: They transform through results like better appearance, energy levels, mental clarity, then evangelize to convert others.
Take Bryan Johnson: unhealthy lifestyle (sin), moment of clarity about mortality after selling his company for $800 million (awakening), development of the Blueprint protocol (intervention), & transformation into a biohacking evangelist helping followers reverse their age (salvation).
His narrative functions identically to a religious testimony, just with more viral erections.
These transformation posts serve the same psychological/social function as public testimonies in religious context. They validate the belief system, create social cohesion, & reinforce the convert's commitment by publicizing it.
Social Media is our Confessional Space
Religious traditions built confessionals; wellness culture built comment sections.
Social media wellness practices today are literal pages ripped out from secularized confession:
"What I Eat in a Day" videos: Structured food diaries as public testimony of consumption. Though most creators serve us performance of virtue barring reality.
Fitness tracking apps: Platforms like Strava automatically generate confessional content. Users describe missing step goals in explicit moral terms—"I was bad yesterday" or "I failed"—language previously reserved for religious transgression.
Wellness challenge check-ins: Protocols like 75 Hard demand regular public accountability. The anxiety around missing a check-in hilariously exceeds the anxiety of missing the actual practice.
The metrics-driven nature of these confessions like step counts, calorie intake, meditation minutes quantifies moral assessment.
We've traded in rosary beads for Oura rings, but we're still counting our way to redemption.
Influencer as Priest
Both priest and influencer mint their authority in the same way: the alchemical proof that suffering can be transmuted into salvation.
Examples:
Bryan Johnson built Blueprint on his transformation from burned out tech CEO to anti-aging zealot.
David Asprey built Bulletproof Coffee around his transformation from "fat, executive" to "optimized biohacker."
Wim Hof built his breathing & cold exposure method after overcoming grief following his wife's suicide.
Wellness influencers employ classic religious credentialing, the personal transformation story establishes their connection to higher wisdom, while their results provide proof of their methods' efficacy.
This pattern extends to brand founders too:
John Mackey framed Whole Foods as the result of his personal awakening to the healing power of food following illness.
Chip Wilson positioned Lululemon as emerging from his personal transformation through yoga.
In both cases, the origin story established authority through personal redemption.
They’ve inspired millions, myself included.
Humans have always gravitated towards charismatic voices, our evolutionary wiring naturally responsive to authentic conviction.
Morning Rituals
Morning routines are text-book purification rites.
Elaborate 12-step morning routines eerily match monastic morning offices.
Both begin with purification, progress through devotional practices, & conclude with preparation for the day's work.
Only the deity being worshipped has changed from God to the optimized self.
This commercialization has created a $10.3 billion "morning wellness" market.
Neuroscientists have confirmed that when participants perform ritualized wellness behaviors, they see uncanny activation patterns in the same brain regions that light up during religious ritual like prayer.
In "The Creative Act," music producer Rick Rubin explores this concept from an artist’s perspective. Rubin argues that ritualistic practices create a gateway to transcendence, not through the actions themselves but through how they transform our perception.
Daily rituals help us "connect to source"—his term for the universal creative energy.
"The purpose isn't in the doing," Rubin explains, "but to evolve how we see the world when we are not engaged in these acts."
These rituals build what he calls the "musculature of our psyche," training our minds to perceive reality with greater clarity and creative potential.
The transformative power of ritual lyes not in the specific actions performed but in how those actions reshape our consciousness.
This explains why wellness practices with little scientific evidence provide real psychological benefits when performed ritualistically. The ritual structure serves a fundamental human need previously met by religion.
Fitness Studios as Modern Cults
I was at SoulCycle the other day & couldn't help but notice the religious undertones. Think darkened rooms & precisely calibrated 158bpm music driving heart rates to transcendental states. All while spotlight-illuminated instructors commanded movement like modern-day priests leading worship.
Fitness studios intentionally employ ‘spatial sacralization’ - design elements from religious spaces that evoke intense transcendent experiences.
The darkened room, elevated instructor platform, synchronized movements, & carefully curated music create what religious scholars call a 'liminal space’ - a threshold between ordinary reality & transcendent experience.
Religious institutions have employed these elements for millennia to facilitate collective ecstatic experiences.
CrossFit, with its "boxes" instead of gyms, ‘Workouts of the Day’, rather than routines, & passionate defense of methodology against critics, has strong cult-like characteristics. If you’ve met a member, you’d understand what I’m talking about.
They don't just drink the Kool-Aid; they mix it with protein powder too.
The economic model strengthens the cult-like nature.
Equinox's tiered membership system, with increasingly exclusive access at higher price points EXACTLY mirrors historical religious practices where more money donated meant greater access to inner sanctums.
The $500+ monthly membership for destination clubs transforms conspicuous consumption into conspicuous virtue.
What these studios sell isn't physical transformation but spiritual experience in secular packaging, a modern form of religious belonging designed to appear non-religious while satisfying the same psychological needs.
~ final thoughts
Western souls didn't stop seeking the sacred. They simply moved the altar from church to studio, trading hymns for mantras while the human hunger for meaning remains ruthlessly unchanged.
Society bears responsibility here.
When Nietzsche proclaimed "God is dead", what he meant to say was that we've abandoned traditional moral frameworks without replacing the psychological infrastructure they provided.
The resulting void makes us desperate buyers in any marketplace of meaning.
Hence the move toward the optimized self, our yearning for omnipotence through the human experience.
The $6 trillion we collectively spend on wellness annually is the largest unacknowledged religious movement in human history.
We've replaced the promise of eternal life with the promise of extended health-span, traded sin for inflammation, and substituted priests with influencers.
