How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/magazine/big-business-gwyneth-paltrow-wellness.html [www.nytimes.com]
2018-08-02 16:10
Before we knew it, the wellness point of view had invaded everything in our lives: Summer-solstice sales are wellness. Yoga in the park is wellness. Yoga at work is wellness. Yoga in Times Square is peak wellness. When people give you namaste hands and bow as a way of saying thank you. The organic produce section of Whole Foods. Whole Foods. Hemp. Oprah. CBD. “Body work.” Reiki. So is: SoulCycle, açaí, antioxidants, the phrase “mind-body,” meditation, the mindfulness jar my son brought home from school, kombucha, chai, juice bars, oat milk, almond milk, all the milks from substances that can’t technically be milked, clean anything. “Living your best life.” “Living your truth.” Crystals.
The newsletter was at first kind of mainstream New Age-forward. It had some kooky stuff in it, but nothing totally outrageous. It was concerned with basic wellness causes, like detoxes and cleanses and meditation. It wasn’t until 2014 that it began to resemble the thing it is now, a wellspring of both totally legitimate wellness tips and completely bonkers magical thinking: advice from psychotherapists and advice from doctors about how much Vitamin D to take (answer: a lot! Too much!) and vitamins for sale and body brushing and dieting and the afterlife and crystals and I swear to God something called Psychic Vampire Repellent, which is a “sprayable elixir” that uses “gem healing” to something something “bad vibes.”
A woman called an akashic-records healer who reads your past, present and possible future lives sat me down and asked about my foot pain. I asked her how she knew I had foot pain. I wasn’t limping. She said, “You have flat feet.” I nodded, incredulous. “I do,” I said. “I have flat feet.” She told me that 13 lives ago, my feet were chopped off as punishment for a crime. As a result, since then, whenever I reincarnate (which is every 100 to 500 years because I like to rest between incarnations), my feet are flat because I like the surety of them entirely touching the ground.
This goes for longer than I expected, but it’s fascinating throughout. I learned so much, though none of it is anything I need or even want to know.
Also, a post about how such articles are written: https://tinyletter.com/annehelenpetersen/letters/that-unsolvable-lack-1
source: DF