Here’s my hot take: the wellness industry is trendy as hell.
The irony is not lost on me. I’m the guy who opened a wellness club in Austin, Texas, so I am very much inside the industry I’m talking about. We have cold plunges. We have sauna. We have red light. We have recovery technology. We care deeply about health, longevity, movement, and helping people feel better.
But building a long-term business inside wellness has forced me to wrestle with one question more than almost any other: how do you build something lasting in an industry that seems determined to reinvent itself every five minutes?
Look at the last decade alone. There was a period when plant-based eating seemed destined to take over the world and meat was slowly disappearing from every conversation about health. Now you can open your phone and find someone eating almost nothing but meat and butter and calling it the answer. CrossFit dominated the conversation for years. Now everyone is training for Hyrox. Yoga had its moment, then Pilates, then reformer Pilates, then mat Pilates somehow became the newest thing again. We went from “eat intuitively” to tracking every gram of protein, every calorie, every glucose spike, every minute of sleep, every step, every breath.
Then you get into the longevity world and it becomes even more intense. Peptides. Wearables. Red light therapy. Sauna protocols. Cold exposure. Biomarker testing. Supplements. Hormone optimization. Morning sunlight. Sleep scores. VO2 max. Zone 2. There is seemingly a new protocol every week telling you what you should be doing, what you are doing wrong, and what you should start measuring next.
Some of it is genuinely exciting. A lot of it is useful. We have invested in plenty of it at Gevity, and I’m not interested in pretending new technology or better information does not matter. It does.
What I question is whether we are starting to confuse the tools with the point.
I have traveled to more than 60 countries, spent weeks in the mountains, slept in tents, stayed in tiny villages, crossed borders overland, and found myself in plenty of places without access to anything resembling the modern wellness industry. No perfect protein intake. No recovery score. No sauna protocol. No wearable telling me whether I had permission to feel good that day.
Some of the healthiest and happiest I have ever felt was with a backpack on, outside all day, eating objectively questionable camp food, moving constantly, sleeping because I was genuinely tired, and spending time with people I cared about.
There is something humbling about that.
You can spend an enormous amount of money trying to engineer wellbeing, then go into the mountains and discover that your body still responds remarkably well to sunlight, movement, purpose, food, sleep, laughter, and being around people you enjoy.
I do not think that means we should throw away everything modern wellness has taught us. That would be equally silly. I just think the basics deserve more respect than they get.
Movement matters. Recovery matters. Nature matters. Good food matters. Curiosity matters. Community matters. Strong relationships matter. Having something to work toward matters. Having people to share it with matters.
And work matters too.
That piece is sometimes strangely absent from wellness conversations. Unless you happen to have won the lottery, most of us still have careers, businesses, responsibilities, bills, families, and things we are trying to build. Meaningful work can be a huge part of a healthy life. So can ambition. The problem is not that people care about their work. The problem is when work consumes everything around it and starts taking more from your life than it gives back.
That became one of the central ideas behind Gevity.
We were never interested in building a place where wellness existed in its own little bubble. I did not want people to have to finish their workday, fight traffic across Austin, go to a different building to train, another place to recover, and then hopefully still have enough energy left to see a friend.
I wanted those things to coexist.
Come in and get some work done. Move your body. Have a conversation with someone you did not know six months ago. Take a class. Sit in the sauna. Try something new. Grab coffee. Spend an hour completely focused. Then maybe close the laptop and go home while you still have something left in the tank.
That feels much closer to wellness to me than constantly chasing the newest intervention.
The newest technology absolutely has a place in that world. If something can help people recover better, understand their bodies, sleep better, or feel healthier, I want to know about it. But I never want the club to become dependent on whatever happens to be having its moment on Instagram that month.
Because trends have a very short memory.
I am sure ten years from now we will look back at some of what we are doing today and laugh. Some protocols will prove more useful than we realized. Others will quietly disappear. There will be new diets, new workouts, new devices, new supplements, new acronyms, and probably several things none of us have even imagined yet.
That is fine.
Innovation should keep moving. We should keep learning. We should change our minds when better information becomes available. I would actually be worried if wellness looked exactly the same ten years from now.
But underneath all of that change, I think there are some things we are unlikely to outgrow.
I have a hard time imagining a future where people no longer need to move their bodies. I cannot imagine technology replacing the feeling of having people around you who actually know you. I do not think meaningful work suddenly becomes irrelevant. I doubt sunlight, sleep, food, purpose, curiosity, or time outside are going to have a bad quarter and fall out of fashion.
And I really struggle to imagine a future where people do not need somewhere they enjoy spending their days.
That is the part I keep coming back to.
When you build a company, especially in an industry moving this quickly, there is enormous pressure to predict what comes next. You are constantly being shown the newest thing and told that this is where the market is going. Sometimes that information is useful. Sometimes it can make you lose sight of why you started in the first place.
I would rather build around things that are deeply human and let the technology evolve around them.
Give people an environment that makes movement easier. Give them somewhere they can do meaningful work without feeling isolated. Make recovery part of the rhythm instead of another appointment to squeeze in. Create enough openness that friendships can happen naturally. Give people reasons to be curious, try something different, and occasionally get uncomfortable.
Then, when something genuinely useful comes along, bring it in.
That order matters to me.
Wellness should help us live better lives. Our lives should not become elaborate maintenance programs for our wellness routines.
Maybe that is ultimately what I am most skeptical of when it comes to trends. Not that they are wrong, but that they can become another distraction from the incredibly ordinary things that make being a person feel good.
I am happy to be wrong about the next diet, the next recovery modality, or the next piece of longevity technology.
I would just rather not be wrong about what people actually need.