The Wellness Counterculture
The New Search for Enlightenment
On a warm November morning in West Palm Beach, Florida, several thousand people gathered at the recent Eudemonia conference, engaging in what might be considered the latest American (health) revolution. Like their countercultural predecessors of the 1960s, they came to reject an establishment—not the military-industrial complex this time, but the medical-pharmaceutical empire. Where Timothy Leary once urged young people to "Turn on, Tune in, and Drop Out," today's wellness prophets advocate "Optimize, Quantify, and Bio-hack," a mantra that, despite its corporate-friendly veneer, carries a similarly subversive charge.
The scene would have been familiar to anyone versed in the mechanics of modern rebellion: participants sharing protocols for circumventing traditional health systems, discussing the use of alternative hacks like vibration plates and cold plunges, and trading tips for optimizing their biology beyond what conventional healthcare considers necessary—or perhaps wise.
I asked my partner – a yoga teacher who has taught at top retreat centers like the Kripalu Center for decades - what he thought of this current wellness movement because he had been there for the first one, having hitchhiked to Boulder, Colorado in 1970 to see Chogyam Trungpa and Ram Dass speak. "There are a lot more products now," he said.
His observation, while accurate, simplifies a deeper truth: both movements represent attempts to hack the human experience. Where the Human Potential Movement of the 70’s used meditation and psychedelics to expand consciousness, today's optimizers employ peptides and photobiomodulation to extend human capabilities. The tools may have changed, but the underlying impulse—to transcend accepted limitations of human existence—remains remarkably consistent.
This parallel becomes clearer when examining some of the movement's intellectual leaders. Ram Dass and Dave Asprey, for example, separated by half a century, can both be considered guerrilla researchers of human potential. Ram Dass conducted his experiments in consciousness through meditation and LSD; Asprey does his through infrared saunas and neurofeedback, for example. Both men have been dismissed by some in the establishment as dangerous charlatans peddling unproven methods. Both attracted devoted followers who viewed them as pioneering explorers of human possibility.
In my opinion, Ram Dass and Asprey, alongside events like Eudemonia, also serve an important function in the culture, which is to expand the range of ideas and perspectives, and empower people in new ways of thinking. Even my 85-year-old non-biohacking dad in New Jersey has taken a mindfulness class at his local community college and supplements with phosphatidylserine for his brain function. Seeds planted grow in unexpected ways.
Asprey’s Biohacking Conference, which I have attended for the past two years and is one of my favorite events, has become an annual pilgrimage for the optimization faithful, and bears striking similarities to the consciousness-expanding gatherings of the 1970s. People come together to share their experiences with supplements and health solutions, similar to how people in the past shared meditation tips and psychedelic drug experiences in their quest for personal growth. The key difference lies not in the fundamental impulse but in its expression: where the counterculture of the sixties sought to transcend the body, today's movement seeks to perfect it.
This new counterculture has developed its own language, its own moral framework, and its own economy. Terms like "sovereign health" and "metabolic flexibility" function as both scientific concepts and rallying cries against medical orthodoxy. When conference attendees discuss "pushing the boundaries of human potential," they're not just talking about personal improvement—they're articulating a critique of a medical establishment they view as unnecessarily constrained by conventional wisdom and corporate interests.
Yet even as the movement grows more commercial, it shows signs of spawning its own counterculture. A growing contingent of wellness enthusiasts is turning toward what might be called "analog optimization": homesteading, homeschooling, and the "traditional living" movement exemplified on Instagram by the “trad wife” and “natural momma”. These influencers, while still part of the broader wellness community, seek to strip away the technology that has become central to much of modern wellness culture.
Although this might seem like a rejection of the high-tech biohacking world, it represents another face of the same countercultural impulse. This group’s version of the Eudemonia Summit is called Wise Traditions, which I attended this past October in Orlando. The almost 2000 participants shared fermentation techniques and soil-building strategies with the same revolutionary fervor that biohackers discuss their latest peptide stacks. Both groups are seeking independence from systems they view as compromised—whether industrial agriculture or conventional medicine and a desire to reclaim agency over one's own well-being.
What unites these seemingly disparate expressions of wellness culture is precisely what united the seekers of the 1970s: a fundamental rejection of the status quo, coupled with an almost utopian belief in the possibility of radical transformation. Whether that transformation comes through technology or tradition matters less than the underlying conviction that current societal norms around health and consciousness are inadequate and possibly corrupt.
As wellness culture continues to evolve, it increasingly resembles not so much a lifestyle choice as a full-fledged resistance movement—albeit one that comes with a sophisticated marketing strategy and in some cases, premium pricing. Its participants might be seeking optimization through artificial intelligence-driven protocols or authenticity through ancestral wisdom traditions, but they share their counterculture ancestors' fundamental conviction: that the path to human flourishing lies somewhere outside the boundaries of conventional society.
In this light, the wellness movement emerges not just as a collection of health practices but as the latest chapter in America's long tradition of heterodox thinking about human potential starting as far back as the Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau in the 1840s and lives on at retreat centers like Esalen and the Omega Institute and in some parts of our wellness offerings at Six Senses.
That this thinking now comes wrapped in the language of optimization and quantification might seem paradoxical, but countercultures have always adopted the tools of their times while subverting their intended purposes. Today's wellness seekers are following this tradition, using the technologies and languages of mainstream culture to pursue decidedly non-mainstream ends.
What also unites these seemingly disparate expressions of wellness culture is a yearning for community among those who see the world differently. Whether in a conference center in West Palm Beach or at a retreat center in Big Sur, these gatherings serve a need that brought people to Boulder half a century ago: the profound desire to be among one's tribe.
As wellness culture continues to evolve, it increasingly resembles less a unified movement than a spectrum of responses to modern life's complexities. In this light, perhaps wellness culture's greatest contribution isn't its various protocols and products but its preservation of a distinctly American – and countercultural - tradition: the endless search for better ways of being and a better way of life.
As often happens, today’s “snake oil” may be tomorrow’s mainstream product. Like yoga and organic food before them, today's unconventional health trends may become tomorrow's mainstream practices. Just as small natural grocery stores evolved into Whole Foods, emerging technologies such as red light therapy and continuous glucose monitoring could soon become ubiquitous in everyday life.
Inspired by The NY Times article on the Eudemonia Summit, I was curious to know what the Times had written about Chogyam Trungpa in the 70’s. I did a quick search and found this Opinion piece from 1995 entitled, “In Praise of the Counterculture” which I thought spoke to both then and now:
“At its essence, the counterculture was about one of conservatives' favorite words: values. It was a repudiation of the blind obedience and reflexive cynicism of politics as usual. It was about exposing hypocrisy, whether personal or political, and standing up to irrational authority. As in any large movement, it accommodated its share of charlatans and sociopaths. But it is part of us, a legacy around which Americans can now unite, rather than allow themselves to be divided.”
Vive la revolution!
Your article brilliantly captures how the current wellness movement serves as a modern evolution of the 1960s and 70s counterculture, highlighting the rejection of established norms, the pursuit of personal empowerment through diverse practices, and the shared quest for community and transformation that unites seekers of well-being today.