I don’t think it is particularly controversial to suggest that things are bad. In high school history class, I remember musing to myself, “what would it be like growing up amidst a world war? A genocide?” And now, as I walk down the street to my 9-5, iced latte in hand, Tate McRae in my air pods, I think, “Ahh, it is like this.” Both an antagonist and symptom of our increasingly fascist nation is hyper-consumerism. The 9 trillion dollar wellness industry, a third of which is made up of spirituality-related goods and services, serves as a reservoir from which the sewer-dwelling MAHA pipelines siphons. This isn’t to say that all wellness spaces are ultimately pools of conservatism, just as all estuaries are not sewage. There are many iterations of the white woman commandeering spiritual practices, and while at face value a “NamaSTAY in bed” tank from TJMaxx and woman who refuses to vaccinate her child are not equivocally violent, they are inextricable. That’s not really what I’m getting at here, though. There are plenty of think pieces about this more accurately dissecting how The Whites have bastardized their customs while ostracizing the people from which they originated. What got me writing this was I saw a hilarious TikTok that suggested that the reason we are in the hell scape of the past 10 years or so is because so many white women got into crystals and shit with no sense of what any of that means that we’ve inadvertently opened a litany of portals and dark holes culminating in… this. I am gifted bundles of sage regularly, I’ve purchased crystals off of Etsy, and own several tarot decks. I bought evil eye earrings from, yes, TJMaxx. I am so sorry for any portals I have accidentally opened.

The closest I’ve ever come to spiritual psychosis was around 2020– SHOCKER! I was miserable and full of self loathing, attempting to crawl my way out of a binge/restrict eating disorder and severe depression one journal entry at a time. I had, at my peak, five journals: one to track my weight loss attempts, one for general musings, one for recording my dreams, one for gratitude, and one for my manifestations. I would watch tarot videos on YouTube and let confirmation bias paint a portrait of future happiness. I would repeat affirmations to myself on my walks, on my drives. I wrote mantras repeatedly in my journal. I “scripted” my future, writing detailed accounts of how my day would look in a year, in five. I was so hopelessly in love with a friend, and I wrote his name again and again on a paper and buried it in the back yard. I wasn’t really convinced any of this was real, I was just desperate.

I joined a meditation group. And I was so frustrated at how normal everyone else seemed, like silent contemplation and Buddhist musings weren’t their last chance at survival. We read The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Using this as a framework, we structured our meetings around the eight components: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. The group I had joined, originally crafted as a modern-day Sangha, is now an “AI-first performance management system.”

I still have a collection of tarot decks, one of which sits in my desk at work. From time to time, I will bring it out and predict the futures of my coworkers. I never skip an astrology post, though nowadays the ones I get fed are mostly the “what cat are you” variety. Matt and I now share a studio apartment, so the clutter-items from my last place are under my bed. Smudge sticks, sage bundles, crystals and crystal-looking rocks are probably generating a cosmic level of energy, supercharged by dust bunnies and vanished socks.

I’m not entirely sure what the “healthy dose” is– I just have a sense that there is one. Mindfulness is good. Isolating yourself on a month long silent retreat probably is not. Understanding that ones’ perspective can shift their experience of reality is good. Treating The Secret as Bible is not. Eating whole foods and drinking herbal teas is good. Doing so in lieu of vaccination is not. I suppose “the dose makes the poison” does not solely apply to things one can imbibe.

I typically admire people who take things to the extreme. Mistaking their zealousness for passion and purpose. And in turn, I often self-flagellate myself for not having such a firm calling or sense of duty to a cause or way of being. Why attempt sustainability if I’m not keeping my year’s trash to a mason jar? Why volunteer if I am not logging hundreds of hours? Why go to a protest if I’m not the one organizing it? And I think that’s where the desirability of “spirituality” in the modern day packaging becomes so appealing, and I also think that’s where it goes all wrong. It is easy to get wrapped up in how to be. What to care about or believe in or do. You get bogged down by the thousands of injustices and the myriad of ways you can engage with them, tangled up in your own self-interests, goals, and needs, and then, cutting through the noise, is the promise that all you have to do, is be. That actually, the part of you that is worried about all these things, isn’t you. You are, actually, this ethereal and untouchable being, the observer, and every bad thing you have said or done or thought is a manifestation of ego. And if you denounce ego, and put some rocks on your windowsill, and go to a few CorePower classes, you are free. Of course, this is not Buddhism. This is a perverse, neoliberal interpretation of it. But I can’t blame anyone for being enticed by a sort of new-wave christianity, a non-religious religious practice that involves no practice at all and allows you to absolve yourself of your sins with, BONUS: trinkets.

Like with most essays, I started this a while ago, and I have been writing it in spurts over the course of maybe a year. Last night, I started watching Mad Men. My mom has been begging me to do so, for the writing, the artistry, the historic snapshot, and, perhaps most importantly, for Jon Hamm. The pilot gave me the edge to finish this piece. The joke that started it all, “white women opened a worm hole,” is funny, and, if I may be that person at the party, inherently misogynistic. It is so easy to blame the women! Yeah, we buy a lot of shit, but why? Men engineer the consumer environment, create the standards, sell women the products, and then culture mocks women for being vain and consumerist. In the pilot, Don Draper asserts that advertising is built on one thing: happiness. He explains, “happiness is the smell of a new car, freedom from fear, and the reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay.” For men, that reassurance may be from a deep, deep, deep, sense of guilt. But for women, it is from decades of being treated as an inconvenience, or a punchline, or entertainment. So forgive us for taking some time to find our bearings, and for using the conveniently placed crutches of shopping to do so.

Capitalism, when guard rails are in place, can work, I think. But if we view capitalism as Frankenstein’s monster, and Frankenstein is a bunch of overgrown frat bros with a drinking problem and a fundamental disregard for anyone not male, straight, or white… well…perhaps the portals aren’t such a bad thing? Maybe we should all spam TikTok shop for incense and amethysts until this whole thing combusts.