The future of wellness: Interview with Toby Shorin

Is mental health the new spirituality for Millennials? And what are its limits?

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Toby Shorin is a culture writer who’s got a habit of blowing my mind. I’ve been a long admirer of Toby’s writing on Millennial culture and wellness, and a solid percentage of my hot takes are inspired by him.

In this interview we talk about the future of wellness and community, how mental health is the new spirituality for Millennials, and the limits of the tech and therapy for fulfillment.

The future of wellness?

Johnny: Folks are looking for community for mental health reasons, yet most mental health modalities are 1:1 based. How do you think community versus individualism will play out in wellness or medicine? 

Toby: I think group modalities will have a comeback. Encounter groups were very popular in the 60s and 70s. I think that they will get popular again. Group retreats are already really popular now. So I think more new types of retreat spaces will get created, and perhaps the idea of doing a retreat will creep out of its either luxurious or spiritual-ascetic paradigm and move more into something that one does more as a commonplace healing thing. 

But what about new social forms? The thing that is driving much of the demand for new social forms is group chats, right? Group chats of all sorts: iMessage groups, Instagram groups, Slack discords, telegram groups - in Squad Wealth we talked about how behind every powerful person is a powerful group chat. People want the togetherness they feel in these digitally local spaces of like minded people, but in physical proximity.

The group chat is not a therapeutic endeavor - far from it. But perhaps it could be. Some of my friends have the idea that there ought to be something like a Discord therapist, who works in Discord with your cracked out, little shitposting community. I feel like there's not enough experimentation happening here on this front as well. 

There’s also an idea among wellness entrepreneurs called ”social wellness.” It’s drawing on ideas like the loneliness epidemic, which is the other driver I wanted to point to. In the UK the loneliness epidemic has become very established. They appointed a loneliness czar - a minister of loneliness. The USA’s surgeon general seems to be trying to do something similar here. And part of the initiatives that they're doing in the UK involve a caseworker being able to prescribe you a community -  a men's group or a church or drug abuse recovery group or something. 

I've yet to really dig into literature on this and see what kind of effects it's having. It's a fairly new program. I sense that especially where there is socialized health care, there are very clear incentives to put in place social prescribing types of programs. So I expect to see more of a propagandistic emphasis - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way - just a government communications emphasis on groups combating loneliness and dollars being spent on efforts to that end in the coming years.

Mental health as religion

Johnny Bowman: To that end, it seems like there’s energy around returning to Christianity, or perhaps more broadly, established religions. Do you see that as a part of this?

Toby: I find it really hard to distinguish the discourse online from what's really going on. Millennials control the discourse. And Millennials are in the age of their lives where they are realizing most of them didn't make billion dollar companies. They have average jobs, average lives and they are turning to mental health, which is a religion of sorts, and the original religion of their childhood, to figure out meaning for themselves.

This is something that happens when people hit 35 or 40. That's the 21st century. That's what people do. And I think all the preaching and cheerleading about it is just people posturing online to feel better about themselves. I think that's a huge aspect of what's going on. 

There's another aspect, which is that Millennials started very atheistic because we grew up in the era where New Atheism was popular, which was the apotheosis of the slow rise of secularity after the high watermark of 50s evangelical America. I do think that there's something else important to understand about Millennials turning to religion now, but I haven’t fully figured it out.

The limits of tech careerism and therapy

Johnny Bowman: Do you find other things Millennials are gravitating towards to solve the meaning crisis for themselves?

Toby: No, I don't see other things. I mean, first of all, the emphasis put on making it in your work career is really just about deferring the fantasy of why you are doing it. Why is that? So that you can have a great life with your family and kids and all that. This insight comes from Jake Naviasky, so I can't claim credit for it, but careerism is about delayed gratification and deferring the fantasy which is to have your interpersonal life sorted and feel secure in what you have. 

From this perspective the intense focus on mental health we see right now is about, “Oh shit, I'm not going to get what I want. Can I find a way to cope more directly?” Religion also provides answers to those questions. I don't think that the therapy ideology does a great job of answering those questions, honestly— I do think religion has much more classic and wise answers to many of those questions.

I think there are other things that people can attach themselves to, too. You can attach yourself to tech logic and extremely utilitarian and impersonal visions of “we need to create growth or we need to create progress and that's how I’m motivated, because I'm enslaving myself to this much more macro theme”—that would be classic tech thinking. 

That’s every time you read a story about a tech guy who did his Ayahuasca journey after he was burnt out from running a company for a decade. And he's now thinking about how to make his family life better—that's the collapse of that specific narrative. It doesn't work either. 

And it's not just a Silicon Valley story. It's an American thing in general. American tradition is leaving your family, leaving your house, going to do this individual pursuit. Then, in the Hero's Journey, the Hero returns with the wife. That's basically the story. You somehow return with the gifts and now you're at home with your wife and kid and you can live happily ever after. The Happily Ever After is the point that most people want to get to.

How to find Toby

Johnny Bowman: I think I think you've just summarized my whole career right there. How can folks get more Toby?

Toby: I have a new project called Care Culture where I research mental health, wellness, subcultures and spirituality, and examine the role that culture plays in healing and health. So you should subscribe to that if you'd like this.

You can also follow Toby on Twitter at @tobyshorin.

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