Last time, I said my body isn’t a problem to be solved and I wholeheartedly stand by that. What I didn’t say is how aggressively the world disagrees.

Resolution season has a way of turning “be a little healthier” into “fix yourself immediately.” It doesn’t ask how you’re doing. It asks what you’ve bought. And once you start paying attention, you realize this isn’t new behavior, it’s tradition. We’ve always been wildly confident that the next food, supplement, or rule will finally bring our bodies into compliance.

History is basically one long wellness experiment conducted with absolute certainty and very little evidence.

The ritual is predictable. January arrives carrying smoothies the color of lawn clippings, inspirational quotes written in fonts that scream Live Laugh Suffer, and the belief that this year, this year, we’re finally going to crack the code on health. Not sustainable health. Not realistic health. Miracle health.

And humans, historically speaking, love a miracle.

That’s why I always think of Paul Crenshaw’s essay Stupid Shit People Used to Believe when wellness trends roll in. Not because we’re stupid now, but because we’re remarkably consistent. We want simple answers to complicated problems, preferably wrapped in produce, supplements, or a single heroic ingredient that promises to fix everything if we just commit hard enough.

Take carrots.

During World War II, the British had a pretty significant edge over the Germans: radar. It allowed Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots to spot enemy planes in the dark, before they even made it across the English Channel. Naturally, this was not information the British wanted to share, so they did what any good government does in a pinch: they blamed vegetables.

According to the Ministry of Food, pilots like RAF ace John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham weren’t winning nighttime dogfights because of top-secret technology. Oh no. It was carrots. Buckets of them. Apparently, if you ate enough orange root vegetables, you could see in the dark like a barn cat with a mission.

The story worked spectacularly well. Civilians were urged to plant “victory gardens,” carrots became the produce equivalent of a war hero, and by 1942, Britain was sitting on a 100,000-ton carrot surplus. That’s not a metaphor. That’s an agricultural oops.

Two lessons there: propaganda works, and people will enthusiastically eat vegetables if you promise them superpowers.

Fast forward to today, and the carrots have been replaced with turmeric, apple cider vinegar, matcha, collagen, chlorophyll water, and whatever seed blend TikTok is currently whispering about. Same impulse. New packaging.

Then there’s Vitamin C.

If you say out loud that Vitamin C doesn’t cure colds, someone nearby will clutch their supplement bottle like a rosary. This belief isn’t about health, it’s about control. And control is the most valuable product late-stage capitalism has ever sold us.

The myth really took hold in the 1960s when Nobel Prize–winning scientist Linus Pauling began taking heroic, industrial-strength doses of Vitamin C and announced that he felt amazing. In 1970, he published Vitamin C and the Common Cold and suggested Americans consume 3,000 milligrams a day, roughly thirty times what anyone actually needs, but a fantastic amount if your goal is to sell pills by the barrel.

Science tried to intervene. It was ignored.

Study after study found that colds continued to do exactly what colds have always done: arrive when they feel like it, hang around longer than welcome, and leave without explanation. Vitamin C didn’t stop them. It didn’t cure them. At best, it maybe, maybe, shaved off a few miserable hours. Not enough to matter, but enough to keep the fantasy alive.

And fantasy is where the money lives.

Once the public decided Vitamin C was a miracle, marketers moved in like vultures with MBAs. Suddenly, every product on the shelf was “immune boosting,” “cold fighting,” or “doctor recommended,” despite the fact that no doctor was actually involved in that decision. Capsules got bigger. Labels got louder. Price tags crept up. Hope was now available in bulk.

This is where wellness stops being about health and becomes about optics. You’re not supposed to get better. You’re supposed to feel responsible. Swallow the pill. Drink the powder. Post the smoothie. Continue coughing, but now with moral superiority.

January only makes it worse. It’s flu season plus resolution season, the perfect storm of fear and guilt. We’re exhausted, run down, and terrified of doing health “wrong,” so we outsource our agency to the supplement aisle. It’s easier to buy immunity than to accept that bodies are fragile, that viruses exist, and that sometimes the only cure is rest, time, and inconvenience.

Vitamin C never cured the common cold. But it absolutely cured our discomfort with uncertainty. And it taught the wellness industry a valuable lesson: you don’t need proof, just panic, packaging, and a promise that this time, if you buy enough of it, you’ll finally be safe.

This is the wellness-industrial complex in a nutshell. A kernel of truth. A dash of hope. A truckload of marketing. And just enough scientific language to make it feel responsible.

Which brings us back to January.

For a few glorious weeks, we drink green things we don’t enjoy. We chew longer. We sprinkle seeds on everything. We swear off sugar, carbs, joy, and sometimes entire food groups. We post about it. We feel superior.

By March, the resolutions are dead. The smoothies are abandoned. The powders have fused into a drywall. We quietly stop choking down kale stew and pretending nut porridge is satisfying. The blender is shoved back under the cabinet to wait for its annual resurrection. Not because we lack discipline, but because the version of health we’re sold every January isn’t designed to survive real life. It’s designed to thrive on guilt, urgency, and the promise that this time will be different if we just buy the right thing. We don’t fall for it because we’re stupid. We fall for it because New Year’s resolutions turn insecurity into a business model. And every January, we line up to pay for it again.

Health isn’t a cleanse. It’s not a 30-day reset. It’s not carrots granting night vision or Vitamin C banishing viruses on command. It’s boring, incremental, deeply unmarketable consistency. It’s sleep. Movement. Moderation. Stress management. Genetics. Access. Time. Context.

Which is deeply annoying, because none of that fits in a jar.

So if you’re leaning into wellness this New Year, here’s my modest proposal: aim lower. Eat the vegetables you don’t hate. Move in ways you don’t resent. Be skeptical of anything that promises transformation by spring. And remember, humans have been wildly confident about bad health ideas for centuries.

Health, it turns out, was never the product. Hope was.