The Wellness Lie : A Quiet Violence of Good Intentions

We are drowning in pastel-coloured lies.

Everywhere you turn, from corporate corridors to Instagram captions, you’ll find someone preaching about well-being, mental health, and self-care.

There’s a carefully curated aesthetic for it: mindfulness posters in glass offices, HR-sanctioned yoga days, branded “Wellness Wednesday” emails, even LinkedIn thought-leaders sharing teary anecdotes wrapped in hashtags like #MentalHealthMatters.

And yet, behind the filters, behind the slogans and slick campaigns, people are crumbling.

This isn’t wellness. This is performance. A public relations campaign dressed in empathy but running on ego. We’ve become obsessed with the aesthetics of care, not the practice of it.
We’re praising the big-picture slogans, but our daily interactions, the small acts where kindness lives, remain untouched.

Cold. Transactional. Dismissive.

This generation’s approach to mental health is increasingly hollow. A façade. An industry. A ticked box. Organisations roll out mental health initiatives while overworking their teams, gaslighting their staff, and rewarding toxic leadership.

Your CEO’s mental health statement means nothing when your direct manager humiliates you in a meeting. Your workplace wellness app means nothing if your workload is soul-crushing.
Your Instagram quote about “being kind always” means nothing if you’re cruel in private, petty in group chats, and proud of your passive-aggression.

What’s worse? We’re starting to notice. And it’s making us bitter.

People don’t just feel unseen, they feel insulted. There’s something almost abusive in being told that your pain matters in public but being ignored in private.

A mindfulness seminar won’t fix a culture of micromanagement.
A therapy allowance won’t heal an environment where vulnerability is punished.
Posting a suicide hotline won’t redeem the systems that made people feel worthless in the first place.

This isn’t healing. This is hypocrisy. This is spiritual bypassing wrapped in corporate branding.

It’s time we admitted something uncomfortable: the real work of care is not glamorous.
It’s not the panel discussion. It’s not the photo-op. It’s not the aesthetics of vulnerability.
It’s holding your tongue when you want to snap.
It’s following up with the quiet colleague.
It’s writing policies that reflect real compassion, not just risk mitigation.
It’s giving people rest without guilt.
It’s creating space, not just talking about it.

Until we change our daily habits, the tone of our voice, the speed of our judgments, the empathy in our emails, the generosity in our leadership, everything else is just noise. Beautiful, hollow, dangerous noise.

So, here’s the hard truth:
Don’t preach mental health if your lifestyle is an act of quiet violence.
Don’t say “people first” if your systems don’t reflect it.
Don’t speak of kindness if you don’t embody it, in silence, in meetings, in the way you treat people who can’t offer you anything in return.

It’s not the grand gestures that define us.
It’s the small, quiet choices. Over and over again.
That’s what makes us safe to be around. That’s what builds real well-being.
That’s what matters.

Everything else is just branding.