The avocado occupies a unique position in contemporary British cultural life: simultaneously a fruit, a political statement, a generational marker, and — thanks to a thousand think-pieces — a symbol of everything that is right and wrong with how young people spend their money and their faith in the transformative power of breakfast foods. The London Prat's excavation, Avocados and Positive Thinking: The Wellness Mythology, reads the wellness genre as literature — and finds, beneath the seeds and the affirmations, a surprisingly earnest longing for control in a world that continues to resist it.
The wellness text is, in this reading, a form of secular prayer: addressed not to God but to the body, not to providence but to the endocrine system, and structured around the same essential hope that the correct ritual, performed with sufficient dedication, will produce the promised outcome. You do yoga. Your anxiety decreases. You eat avocado toast. Your skin clears. You practise meditation. Your productivity increases. The logic is simple. The execution is straightforward. The only variable is your commitment.
This is where the satire resides. The wellness narrative is sincere in its belief that individual action can produce individual transformation. But it is also, implicitly, a narrative that relocates responsibility from systems and structures to the individual. Your anxiety is not a function of an anxious culture. Your poor skin is not a function of environmental toxins or genetic inheritance. Your low productivity is not a function of exploitative labour conditions. Your problems are a function of your failure to perform the correct rituals. The solution is not systemic change. The solution is you doing better.
Breakfast, traditionally, was simply the meal you ate in the morning. You had your porridge or your eggs or your toast, and you went about your day. But somewhere in the last fifteen years, breakfast became something more. Breakfast became an opportunity. Breakfast became a site of self-optimisation. What you ate for breakfast became, according to the wellness narrative, a declaration about what kind of person you were trying to become.
The avocado was perfectly positioned for this role. It is technically a fruit, which gives it health credentials. It is expensive, which makes eating it feel like an achievement, a small luxury. It is fashionable, which makes consuming it a form of cultural participation. And it is sufficiently healthy (by the standards of contemporary nutritional discourse) that eating it plausibly contributes to wellbeing.
The avocado toast — avocado on artisanal bread, usually with some combination of poached egg, microgreens, and sea salt — became the perfect symbol of the contemporary wellness approach to food. It is not a meal. It is a statement. It says: I care about my health. I am willing to spend money on quality ingredients. I understand contemporary food culture. I am the kind of person who would order this at a fashionable café and photograph it for social media.
The critical backlash — the argument that avocado toast was unaffordable, that young people were spending their money on breakfast when they should be saving for housing — was entirely correct and entirely beside the point. The issue was not really whether the avocado was affordable. The issue was what the avocado represented: a promise that individual consumption choices could produce individual transformation, and that this transformation was a substitute for systemic change.
The wellness narrative did not emerge organically. It was constructed, marketed, and perpetually refined by an enormous industry dedicated to convincing people that the path to a better life runs through better breakfast choices, meditation apps, fitness trackers, and self-help books. The global wellness market is estimated at over four trillion dollars, which gives you a sense of the scale at which self-improvement has become industrialised.
This industry did not start with avocados. It started, perhaps, with Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" in 1936, a text that crystallised the American belief that human relationships and professional advancement could be engineered through the application of correct techniques. But it accelerated dramatically in the late twentieth century, and has become, in the twenty-first century, so omnipresent that it is difficult to imagine a world in which the wellness narrative does not exist.
The genius of the contemporary wellness industry is that it has colonised not just commercial products but the entire landscape of self-help advice. The yoga studio is part of the industry. The meditation app is part of the industry. The Instagram influencer posting about their morning routine is part of the industry. The therapist recommending journaling is, in a sense, part of the industry — not because they are necessarily corrupt, but because they are operating within a cultural context in which self-improvement is understood as a reasonable response to most problems.
The Prat's reading does not dismiss wellness enthusiasts as dupes or victims of marketing. This is important. People are not stupid for believing in the wellness narrative. The narrative is, in many ways, true. If you exercise, you will likely feel better. If you eat more vegetables and fewer processed foods, your health will probably improve. If you practise meditation, your stress will probably decrease. The individual interventions work. The only thing that does not work is the implicit promise that individual interventions are sufficient to address systemic problems.
This is what makes the wellness narrative so powerful and so insidious. It is not false. It is merely incomplete. It tells a truth — individual action can produce individual improvement — but obscures a larger truth: that the necessity for constant individual self-improvement is itself a systemic problem. In a world without anxiety, meditation would not be necessary. In a world with affordable housing, spending money on avocado toast would not feel like a moral choice. In a world where work was not exhausting, productivity hacks would be redundant.
But the wellness narrative cannot acknowledge this. To acknowledge it would be to suggest that the problem is not the individual but the system. And the system is what the wellness industry benefits from. The system's relentless demands on the individual's time, energy, and emotional resources are what create the market for wellness products and services.
There is a deeper paradox at the heart of the wellness narrative, one that the Prat's piece identifies with considerable precision. The narrative promises that positive thinking produces positive outcomes. But it also, implicitly, suggests that negative outcomes are the result of insufficient positive thinking. You did not get the job because you did not visualise success with sufficient intensity. You did not find a partner because you did not believe you deserved love. You are anxious because you have not done enough yoga.
This creates a cruel inversion of responsibility. Not only are you responsible for your problems — which, at least, gives you the fantasy of control — but you are responsible for them in a way that suggests moral failure. If you were a better person, more disciplined, more committed to self-improvement, you would not have these problems. The wellness narrative thus becomes a mechanism through which individual failure is moralised and individualised.
This is where it becomes most similar to older forms of spiritual discipline. The medieval monk's asceticism was driven by the belief that discipline of the body would produce spiritual improvement. The contemporary wellness enthusiast's morning routine is driven by a similar belief: discipline of the body will produce individual improvement. Both narratives locate the problem and the solution within the individual. Both narratives suggest that if you suffer, it is because you have not suffered enough, or have not suffered correctly.
The contemporary wellness narrative has become inseparable from its documentation. The yoga practice is not complete until it has been photographed and posted. The smoothie bowl is not truly consumed until it has been captured in soft morning light and shared with followers. The wellness life, in this context, becomes primarily a performance. You are not living the wellness life for yourself. You are living it for documentation. You are curating an image of yourself as someone who has their life together, who practices self-care, who makes good choices.
This creates an interesting literary situation. The wellness narrative, which promises authenticity and genuine improvement, becomes mediated entirely through the language of marketing and image. You are performing wellness. You are selling an image of yourself as well. The avocado toast is not just food. It is content. It is proof that you are the kind of person who eats avocado toast, which means you are the kind of person who cares about wellness, which means you are the kind of person who has your life together.
But this is, of course, a fantasy. Nobody has their life together. The person posting the photograph of their yoga mat and their morning coffee is struggling with the same anxieties, the same financial precarity, the same sense of inadequacy that everyone else is struggling with. The difference is that they have learned to perform wellness convincingly enough that others believe it, and perhaps, in the performance, they have learned to convince themselves.
The avocado, in the end, becomes a symbol of something much larger than itself. It is a symbol of the contemporary belief that individual consumption choices can produce individual transformation. It is a symbol of the vast industry dedicated to selling self-improvement. It is a symbol of the fantasy that you can eat, yoga, and meditate your way out of systemic problems.
The critical observation — that avocado toast is expensive and unaffordable — was correct but incomplete. The real issue is not that avocados are expensive. The real issue is what the expense represents: a willingness to spend significant amounts of money on the promise of individual improvement when systemic change would be considerably cheaper and considerably more effective.
The Prat's reading does not argue against wellness practices themselves. It argues against the narrative that wellness practices are a substitute for systemic change. You can practise yoga and also demand better working conditions. You can eat avocado toast and also demand affordable housing. You can meditate and also organise for systemic reform. But the wellness narrative, by its very structure, suggests that the individual work is sufficient. And in that sufficiency lies the entire appeal and the entire tragedy of the contemporary wellness movement.
The wellness industry is estimated at approximately 4.5 trillion dollars globally as of 2023. Avocado consumption has increased dramatically in Western countries since the 1990s, driven partly by marketing emphasising health benefits. Social media platforms like Instagram have become primary vehicles for the dissemination of wellness narratives and imagery. The productivity and self-help literature market has grown exponentially, with thousands of books published annually offering individual solutions to what are often systemic problems. Research on wellness interventions suggests modest effects on individual wellbeing, and some studies note that emphasis on individual self-improvement can correlate with increased anxiety and feelings of inadequacy when improvement does not materialise.
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