Wellness culture has an optimization problem

Montreal's not really a city that worships at the altar of productivity. We love a long lunch, shy away from opening up shop on Sundays (or Mondays or Tuesdays), and are inclined to enjoy hours in parks when the weather's right. This stems from a cultural understanding that life's best moments can't be quantified, tracked, or optimized into a dashboard metric.

Knowing this, it's curious to see how wellness culture, in the course of offering a refuge from the tyranny of constant productivity, has become just another thing to optimize: Fitness trackers that monitor REM cycles, apps to calculate cortisol levels, smartwatches pinging users to stand and breathe. The wellness industry is a data-driven arms race where self-care is another metric to keep track of.