The new religion of wellness: from yoga mats to cricket powder

In the absence of religion, modern societies have found new faiths. One of the most peculiar and profitable of these is the cult of wellness. What once meant little more than maintaining health through moderation, movement, and rest has been transformed into a vast cultural phenomenon, a belief system, a lifestyle, and above all, a marketplace. Wellness is no longer about common sense; it is about identity, ritual, and performance, wrapped in a language of purity and transcendence.

Over the last two decades, wellness has grown from a niche trend into a global industry worth hundreds of billions. Yoga, once a spiritual discipline, is now a branded product taught in gyms and streamed in apps. Meditation, once a path toward enlightenment, is sold as a monthly subscription promising stress relief and productivity boosts. Diets are no longer temporary adjustments but full-fledged ideologies, demanding loyalty and evangelism: paleo, keto, veganism, intermittent fasting. Each comes with its own vocabulary, influencers, and rituals. A person’s choice of food, exercise, or supplements has become as much a declaration of belief as any prayer or hymn.

What makes wellness unique is not just its scale but its religious structure. Like any faith, it offers rules and prohibitions: eat this, never eat that. It prescribes rituals: morning routines, evening detoxes, scheduled fasts. It promises salvation, not in the afterlife but in the form of glowing skin, improved focus, longer life. And like religion, it thrives on guilt and redemption: you sinned with sugar, but salvation is at hand in the form of a supplement, a cleanse, or a guided app session. The consumer becomes both sinner and believer, caught in a cycle of indulgence and penance, except the priesthood is made up of wellness coaches, Instagram influencers, and corporations.

In recent years, this faith has taken on increasingly bizarre forms. It is no longer enough to avoid processed food or exercise regularly. The faithful must embrace the exotic, the extreme, the performative diet. One month it is spirulina and kale, the next it is bone broth or charcoal water. And now, under the banner of sustainability, Europe has even approved the use of insects as dietary supplements, presenting cricket powder and mealworm protein as the next step in healthy living. Few people demanded this change, but the industry, always searching for novelty and new markets, packaged it as progress. Eating insects becomes not about taste or tradition, but about identity: proof that you are enlightened, sustainable, forward-thinking.

This is wellness in its purest form: not health, but ideological consumption. To drink green juice, to meditate with an app, to sprinkle cricket powder on your smoothie, these are not acts of necessity but of belonging. They mark the individual as a member of the faithful, someone who is not just alive but living better, cleaner, purer, more aware. The irony is that in the pursuit of wellness, many forget health itself. Hours are spent setting up routines, money flows into overpriced supplements, entire diets are constructed around ideology rather than nourishment. The body becomes a laboratory, the mind a consumer market, and wellness itself a kind of secular religion, complete with rituals, dogmas, and a thriving economy.

The following chapters will explore this new faith in depth: its cult-like rituals, its consumerist spirituality, its diet-based dogmas, its monetization of mindfulness, its obsession with optimization, and its role as the West’s latest substitute for religion. Along the way, we will examine how something as simple as health was transformed into a global business of insecurity, identity, and performance, and why from yoga mats to cricket powder, the promise of wellness may say more about our anxieties than about our health.

The worship of wellness

Every society needs rituals, rules, and beliefs to give shape to life. Where traditional religion once provided these, modern Western societies, increasingly secular, skeptical, and fragmented, have turned to new substitutes. Among these, none has grown so pervasive as the worship of wellness. What began as a sensible concern for health has expanded into an entire belief system, complete with commandments, sacred objects, and a priesthood of influencers and gurus.

The resemblance to religion is striking. Like faith, wellness establishes prohibitions: no sugar, no gluten, no meat, no dairy, no alcohol. These prohibitions are rarely based on universal evidence but on the authority of the wellness doctrine in vogue. Each diet, like a sect, offers its own version of purity. Followers not only obey these rules but wear them as badges of belonging, announcing themselves through food choices, hashtags, and lifestyle declarations.

Wellness also prescribes rituals. The morning routine becomes the equivalent of morning prayer: lemon water at dawn, twenty minutes of yoga, ten minutes of meditation, followed by a green smoothie. The evening routine becomes a kind of vespers: journaling, herbal tea, screen detox. These rituals are not casual habits; they are repeated with the fervor of devotion, meant to cleanse, align, and sanctify the practitioner. The routine becomes a liturgy, and to break it is to fall into guilt, just as missing church once brought shame.

The industry has even created its own sacred objects. The yoga mat is a prayer rug. The meditation cushion is an altar. The water bottle, carried everywhere, becomes a talisman of discipline. Supplements, powders, and tinctures serve as modern relics, each promising to restore vitality or protect against unseen toxins. To the believer, these are not commodities but vessels of meaning, infused with spiritual aura. To drink a turmeric latte is not just to consume a beverage but to participate in a ritual of purification.

Central to this cult is the promise of salvation. But here salvation is not eternal life; it is glowing skin, endless energy, sharper focus, a longer youth. It is the dream of transcending ordinary human frailty, of defeating age and fatigue, of living not just healthily but better than others. In this sense, wellness is not egalitarian. It stratifies society into the enlightened, those who follow the rituals, eat the sacred foods, subscribe to the apps, and the unenlightened, who remain trapped in “toxic” habits. Like all religions, it offers not only salvation but superiority.

And, as with religion, guilt plays its role. The person who cheats on their diet, skips their yoga, or fails to meditate is overcome with self-reproach. But the wellness industry is ready with redemption: detox kits, fasting retreats, new supplements. Redemption is always purchasable. The cycle of sin and forgiveness, once mediated by priests, is now mediated by apps and influencers. The faithful never escape guilt; they are kept within a loop of consumption that promises constant renewal.

What makes this cult particularly effective is that it thrives on anxiety. In a world of uncertainty, economic, social, ecological, people cling to wellness as a realm they can control. If everything else feels unstable, at least you can control your food, your routines, your supplements. The body becomes the last territory of sovereignty, obsessively managed through rules and rituals. Wellness gives the illusion of mastery, even as it drains money, time, and energy.

Thus, wellness is more than a market trend. It is a modern religion without gods, one that channels the spiritual hunger of secular societies into consumer practices. Its rituals give structure, its prohibitions create identity, its sacred objects inspire devotion, and its promises of salvation sustain hope. Yet beneath the aura of health, it remains a system of control, not over the body alone, but over the mind and the wallet.

Consumerist spirituality

The genius of the wellness industry lies in its ability to transform ordinary commodities into objects of belief. A vitamin capsule becomes more than a supplement; it becomes a promise of purity. A smoothie becomes more than a drink; it becomes a ritual of cleansing. A yoga mat ceases to be a rectangle of rubber and becomes a stage for transcendence. Wellness thrives not because its products are revolutionary, but because they are infused with symbolic meaning, sold not as goods but as sacraments.

This transformation turns consumption into a kind of spiritual practice. Buying a supplement is akin to buying a piece of salvation. Each purchase is a step on the path to purity, discipline, or enlightenment. Marketing campaigns reinforce this framing: packaging is minimalist, almost monastic, covered with words like clean, pure, natural, or sacred. The consumer does not just swallow a pill; they ingest virtue. They do not just unroll a yoga mat; they lay down a portable altar.

The process echoes religion in its use of symbols and talismans. Consider the crystal water bottle, sold for many times the price of glass or plastic. Its appeal is not hydration but aura: the crystal supposedly infuses the water with energy, aligning the body with cosmic forces. Or the rise of “superfoods”, acai, chia seeds, spirulina, ordinary plants elevated to divine status through marketing. Their nutritional value, real but modest, is inflated into miracles. To consume them is to demonstrate faith, to prove one’s devotion to the creed of wellness.

Even clothing participates in this consumerist spirituality. Leggings and branded athletic wear are worn not only in gyms but in daily life, signaling membership in the community of the health-conscious. Just as religious garments once marked identity and belonging, so do these uniforms of wellness. They say: I am disciplined, I am enlightened, I am pure. The brand becomes a confession, the body its pulpit.

What makes this particularly powerful is how personal consumption becomes public declaration. Sharing a photo of a turmeric latte or a neatly arranged salad on social media is not about nutrition but about signaling virtue. The wellness industry has merged consumption with performance, transforming private rituals into public liturgies. Instagram feeds function as chapels, each post a testimony of devotion. The faithful gather in likes and comments, affirming the righteousness of each other’s choices.

But unlike traditional religion, which often discouraged materialism, wellness depends on it. Its spirituality is explicitly consumerist: each new product, service, or subscription is framed as a step forward on the path of growth. There is always a new powder to try, a new supplement to add, a new retreat to attend. The faithful are encouraged to see themselves as perpetual seekers, never complete, always needing another purchase. In this way, wellness offers not transcendence but endless consumption dressed as enlightenment.

The irony is that this spirituality often empties itself of substance. Many of the objects it sanctifies, detox teas, miracle supplements, overpriced gadgets, have little to no proven efficacy. Yet this does not diminish their appeal. For the true believer, effectiveness is secondary; what matters is belonging, ritual, and the sense of moving toward purity. To drink the tea, to swallow the capsule, to wear the leggings is to enact belief. Wellness does not sell products; it sells the feeling of progress.

In this sense, wellness reveals the strange paradox of our age: a secular society that rejects traditional religion but still yearns for its comforts. The rituals remain, the symbols endure, the need for meaning persists. Only now, salvation comes not from prayer or pilgrimage but from credit card transactions, each one a small leap of faith into the religion of consumption.

Diets as dogma

Few aspects of wellness reveal its transformation into a belief system as clearly as the modern obsession with diets. Once, a diet was simply a way of eating, determined by region, tradition, and availability of food. Today, diets have become dogmas, complete with rules, communities, evangelists, and heresies. What you eat is no longer a matter of nourishment but of identity, a declaration of belonging to one tribe or another in the marketplace of lifestyles.

The names themselves sound like denominations: paleo, keto, vegan, carnivore, intermittent fasting. Each promises salvation through restriction: eliminate carbohydrates, embrace fat, reject animal products, limit eating hours. Each offers a moral framework: some foods are pure, others toxic. Followers proclaim the benefits with missionary zeal, testifying to their newfound clarity, energy, and health. The diet is no longer a pragmatic choice; it is a conversion experience.

This dogmatism is reinforced by the way diets are marketed. Books, influencers, and subscription services provide not just recipes but commandments. Cheat, and you are not simply indulging, you are sinning. Fall off the plan, and you are backsliding. Redemption, of course, is always available: a new detox, a stricter reset, a premium coaching service to get you “back on track”. Just as religion once promised grace after sin, diets promise renewed discipline after indulgence. The faithful remain in the cycle of failure and recommitment, which sustains the industry.

Into this landscape comes one of the most controversial developments in recent years: the European Union’s approval of insects as dietary supplements. Cricket flour, mealworm protein, grasshopper powder, products that only a decade ago would have been unthinkable in Western diets are now introduced with the language of wellness and sustainability. The justification is framed not in culinary terms but in moral ones: insects are sustainable, they are future-oriented, they are “better for the planet”. Eating them is not about taste but about virtue signaling, proof of being enlightened and progressive.

The irony is that few citizens demanded this change. It is not a grass-roots movement of consumers but a top-down initiative, engineered by corporations and institutions eager to create new markets under the banner of health and sustainability. For many, the reaction is suspicion or rejection; for the wellness industry, it is a golden opportunity. Cricket powder is packaged as a superfood, complete with sleek branding and influencer endorsements. It is presented not as a curiosity but as a sacrament of the future, a way to demonstrate one’s belonging to the avant-garde of health-conscious living.

This reveals the performative nature of diets in the wellness era. Eating insects, like drinking charcoal water or embracing extreme fasts, becomes less about necessity and more about performance. It is a visible act of identity: I am not like the rest, I am disciplined, I am sustainable, I am ahead of the curve. The diet becomes theater, enacted not in kitchens but on social media, where photos of cricket-protein smoothies are shared as proof of virtue. The community of believers applauds, reinforcing the sense that wellness is about being seen to live correctly.

The dangers of this dogmatism are clear. By elevating diets into ideologies, wellness distorts the very purpose of eating. Nutrition is sidelined in favor of narrative. Health is subordinated to performance. Instead of balance, individuals are pushed into cycles of extremism: cutting out entire food groups, embracing expensive substitutes, or consuming products of dubious necessity. The result is not health but anxiety, not nourishment but endless vigilance. Eating becomes a moral battlefield, where every bite is a test of purity.

This is why wellness diets resemble sects: they offer belonging, structure, and a sense of superiority, but at the cost of moderation and common sense. And like sects, they thrive on expansion, constantly searching for the next exotic, the next forbidden, the next revolutionary product to keep the faithful engaged. Today it is kale and quinoa, tomorrow it is cricket flour. The believer’s appetite is not just for food but for meaning, and the wellness industry supplies it in endless variations.

In the end, diets in the wellness age are not about feeding the body but about feeding the self-image. They provide identity, ritual, and superiority, sustained by industries that profit from anxiety. And with each new trend, whether keto, veganism, or insects, the faithful are reminded that wellness is less about eating well than about performing devotion through consumption.

The monetization of mindfulness

If diets represent the dogmatic branch of wellness, then mindfulness and yoga form its spiritual wing. These practices once belonged to ancient traditions, meditation rooted in Buddhism, yoga in Hinduism, designed not to optimize productivity but to cultivate wisdom, discipline, and transcendence. They were never meant to be quick fixes for stress or hacks for efficiency. Yet in the West, they have been transformed into commodities, repackaged for secular consumption, sold in apps, studios, and retreats. What was once a path to enlightenment has become a subscription service.

Mindfulness, for example, is marketed today as a panacea. Apps promise calm in just ten minutes a day, offering guided meditations voiced by celebrities or influencers. Corporate programs sell mindfulness as a way to reduce burnout, increase focus, and improve employee performance. Universities incorporate it into curricula, not as philosophy but as a productivity aid. In each case, the original spiritual depth is stripped away, replaced with a transactional model: download, subscribe, listen, improve. Meditation becomes no longer a discipline of the soul but a consumer product designed to increase output.

Yoga has undergone a similar transformation. Once a spiritual practice uniting body, mind, and spirit, it is now sold as a fitness trend. Yoga studios in Western cities resemble boutiques more than temples: sleek interiors, branded mats, premium memberships. Classes are marketed as calorie-burning, muscle-toning, or stress-relieving sessions, stripped of their philosophical roots. Poses once tied to centuries-old traditions are performed for Instagram photos, more aesthetic than ascetic. For many, yoga has become less about inner balance than about outer performance, another way to display discipline and virtue through consumer choices.

The monetization of mindfulness is not only about selling access to practices but about manufacturing needs. Stress, anxiety, and distraction, universal human experiences, are reframed as problems solvable through products. Instead of cultivating habits of patience, simplicity, or discipline, consumers are taught to buy solutions: meditation subscriptions, yoga retreats, detox getaways. Inner peace becomes an industry, with an endless array of upgrades and add-ons. If one app fails, another promises a new technique. If a local yoga class feels stale, a luxury retreat in Bali is advertised as the next step on the journey.

Even the language reflects this commodification. Words like mindfulness, balance, and flow are used not in their original philosophical contexts but as marketing slogans. A scented candle is sold as mindfulness. A protein bar is branded as balance. Athletic leggings promise not comfort but “flow”. These terms, once tied to deep traditions, now serve as keywords for consumerism, emptied of meaning and filled with profit potential.

The irony is that this monetization often undermines the very purpose of the practices. Meditation is meant to free individuals from attachment, yet wellness culture attaches it to subscriptions and branded products. Yoga is meant to transcend the ego, yet it is repurposed as a way to display the self through photos and lifestyles. The practices survive, but their meaning is inverted. What was once about renouncing consumption is now an engine of consumption.

And yet, the demand continues to grow. Why? Because in a world of constant distraction, people crave stillness. In a culture of anxiety, they crave calm. The tragedy is that instead of finding these through simplicity and discipline, they seek them through commodified shortcuts. The wellness industry thrives by selling the illusion of tranquility, a momentary escape packaged in monthly fees. It promises inner peace, but only if you can pay for it.

Thus, mindfulness becomes another chapter in the new religion of wellness: stripped of depth, dressed in consumer packaging, and sold as a sacrament of calm. It is not about enlightenment but about soothing the anxieties of modern life long enough to keep consumption flowing. Inner peace has become a product line, and its price is printed clearly on the subscription page.

The tyranny of optimization

If the cult of wellness has one central commandment, it is this: you must always be improving. Wellness does not simply promise health or balance; it demands constant optimization. Sleep must be optimized with trackers and supplements. Nutrition must be optimized with powders, probiotics, and carefully scheduled eating windows. Exercise must be optimized with personalized apps, data-driven routines, and wearable monitors. Even leisure must be optimized, packaged as mindful downtime or restorative retreats. The message is relentless: who you are today is not enough; you must always be striving toward a better version of yourself.

This culture of optimization feeds directly on anxiety. Every imperfection, tiredness, stress, poor focus, is reframed not as a normal part of human life but as a failure of management. If you lack energy, it is not because life is demanding but because you have not purchased the right supplement. If you are distracted, it is not because modern life is chaotic but because you have not subscribed to the right mindfulness app. The industry thrives by pathologizing ordinary experiences and selling products to “fix” them. Health is no longer the absence of illness; it is the constant pursuit of improvement.

Technology amplifies this tyranny. Wearable devices record every heartbeat, every step, every hour of sleep. Apps provide daily reminders of hydration, meditation, or posture. The body becomes not a lived experience but a dashboard of metrics, a system to be managed like a corporate project. Numbers replace intuition, and self-worth is measured in steps, calories, or productivity scores. Instead of freedom, individuals become prisoners of their data, compelled to adjust their behavior to satisfy the algorithm’s definition of “wellness”.

Even food, the most basic of human needs, is trapped in this cycle. Meals are not enjoyed but calculated, weighed, and justified according to the ideology of the diet in fashion. One must not simply eat; one must track macros, count calories, and verify that every ingredient aligns with the wellness creed. A simple dinner becomes a moral test, and indulgence becomes sin. The result is a constant state of vigilance, where nourishment is secondary to compliance.

The tyranny extends beyond the individual into social life. Wellness culture frames optimization as not only personal but performative. To demonstrate discipline, people share their routines, their trackers, their perfectly arranged bowls on social media. Wellness becomes a competition, where superiority is measured in smoothies, yoga poses, or biometric data. Instead of bringing peace, the culture fosters comparison, envy, and pressure. Everyone is optimizing, and to fall behind is to appear lazy, unhealthy, or morally suspect.

The irony is that this obsession with optimization often produces the opposite of its promise. Instead of balance, it creates exhaustion. Instead of calm, it generates anxiety. Instead of confidence, it fosters dependence on external validation and technological mediation. The more people try to optimize, the less capable they become of living without the tools, trackers, and rituals that supposedly liberate them. They are no longer free; they are bound by the rules of an endless project.

In this way, wellness transforms life into a perpetual audit. Every breath, bite, and movement is evaluated, improved, and monetized. The self is never allowed to simply be; it must always become. What once was the pursuit of health has become the tyranny of better, a cycle in which optimization itself is the product. The result is not well-being but a deep, unacknowledged fatigue, a fatigue born not of failure but of the impossible demand to be perfect.

The new faith of the West

The rise of wellness in Western societies cannot be understood only as a trend in health or consumer behavior. It is better understood as a spiritual transformation. As traditional religions lost influence, their rituals abandoned, their dogmas questioned, their authority eroded, new belief systems emerged to fill the void. Among these, none has proven so adaptable, profitable, and pervasive as wellness. It functions as the new faith of the secular West, complete with its own theology, rituals, saints, and promises of salvation.

Like religion, wellness offers a moral framework. Foods are divided into categories of good and evil: organic versus processed, natural versus artificial, clean versus toxic. Exercise routines become rites of purification, rituals that must be repeated faithfully to preserve the soul of the body. Supplements serve as sacraments, consumed daily with the hope of maintaining purity. Every choice carries moral weight, every lapse induces guilt. The individual becomes not just a body to be cared for but a soul to be judged.

Wellness also offers rituals of belonging. Yoga classes, mindfulness workshops, and wellness retreats are not only practices but communities. Participants gather, perform rituals together, share testimonies of transformation. Like church congregations, they affirm each other’s devotion and discipline. The act of gathering itself becomes a sacrament, reinforcing the sense that wellness is not just personal health but participation in a larger faith.

The industry has even created its prophets and saints. Influencers and wellness gurus play the role once held by priests, dispensing advice, prescribing routines, offering moral guidance disguised as lifestyle coaching. Their bodies become icons, their daily habits examples to be imitated. They live visibly, publicly, as proof of the faith’s promises, glowing skin, sculpted physiques, calm voices. They embody the ideal, and their followers treat them with reverence, quoting them as if citing scripture.

Even eschatology, the doctrine of last things, finds its parallel. Where religions once promised salvation from sin or death, wellness promises salvation from aging, disease, and decay. Through diets, supplements, and optimization, the faithful are told they can extend youth, preserve vitality, and postpone decline. Death is not denied outright, but it is treated as an enemy to be resisted through the sacraments of wellness. Longevity clinics and biohacking startups now promise to defeat aging itself, offering the ultimate miracle: eternal life, not in heaven but on Earth, purchased through science and supplements.

The theology of wellness is not purely personal; it extends into collective morality. Choosing certain foods, supplements, or diets is framed as an act of global responsibility. Veganism is tied to saving the planet, intermittent fasting to sustainability, insect protein to ecological virtue. The body becomes a site of activism, where what one eats is presented as not only healthy but ethical. Thus wellness unites personal salvation with collective redemption, offering believers the sense that their private rituals contribute to a cosmic good.

Yet unlike traditional religion, wellness has no doctrine of sufficiency. It never declares the believer saved. There is always a new diet, a new supplement, a new retreat, a new subscription. The faithful are kept in a state of perpetual seeking, their anxiety constantly rekindled by the industry’s next innovation. In this way, wellness functions less as a church and more as a marketplace of eternal seeking, where salvation is always promised but never attained.

This is why wellness resonates so strongly in the secular West. It replaces the structure of religion without the inconvenience of dogma. It allows people to feel spiritual without faith, moral without theology, connected without transcendence. It offers meaning without mystery, ritual without reverence, salvation without gods. And yet, in its endless cycle of consumption, it reveals itself as something far more prosaic: a religion where the deity is the self, and the temple is the marketplace.

Health without holiness

Wellness began as a sensible idea: to take care of the body, to eat well, to move, to rest. But in the secular West, stripped of religion yet still hungry for meaning, it has grown into something far larger and more distorted. What was once a matter of balance has become a new faith, complete with commandments, rituals, talismans, saints, and promises of salvation. Wellness no longer speaks in the language of health but in the language of identity and morality, demanding loyalty, sacrifice, and perpetual devotion.

This faith thrives because it fills a vacuum. In societies where traditional religion no longer commands belief, wellness provides rules to follow, communities to join, and rituals to perform. It reassures the anxious, offering purity where life feels polluted, control where life feels chaotic, hope where life feels uncertain. But unlike religion, which at its best sought to lift the individual beyond themselves, wellness traps the individual within the self. Every ritual, every supplement, every subscription is directed toward the improvement of one’s body, one’s image, one’s performance. It is a spirituality of mirrors, endlessly reflecting back the believer’s anxieties and aspirations.

The irony is that this obsession often undermines the very thing it claims to defend. True health is not achieved through endless optimization, constant vigilance, or expensive rituals. It is achieved through simplicity: balanced meals, regular movement, sufficient rest, and moderation. But wellness, in its consumerist form, makes balance impossible. It fosters guilt, fuels anxiety, and demands constant spending. It turns ordinary life into a perpetual project, where one is never good enough, never pure enough, never optimized enough.

The approval of insect-based supplements in Europe illustrates this trajectory perfectly. Few people asked for crickets in their diet, but the wellness narrative packaged it as a sign of progress, sustainability, and moral superiority. The faithful are invited not to enjoy but to perform, to eat insects as a statement, to prove virtue through consumption. It is not health but ideology, not nourishment but identity. Like every other wellness trend, it is less about living better than about belonging to the enlightened tribe.

Wellness has therefore become less about health and more about holiness without gods. It offers salvation not in eternity but in endless optimization. It sanctifies objects, sanctifies diets, sanctifies routines, but rarely sanctifies life itself. It thrives on the performance of purity, even as it exhausts those who pursue it. Its rituals comfort, but they also consume; its promises inspire, but they also enslave.

To live truly well is simpler, and far less glamorous, than wellness culture admits. It does not require cricket powder, $50 subscriptions, or retreats in Bali. It requires moderation, common sense, and the acceptance that health is not perfection but balance. Yet simplicity is not profitable, and so the industry has transformed health into spectacle, selling anxiety and calling it salvation.

In the end, the religion of wellness reflects not our strength but our insecurity. It shows that in a world without gods, we will still build temples, not of stone, but of apps, powders, and mats. And in those temples, we will continue to seek meaning, even if what we find is not transcendence, but an endless cycle of consumption.