We’ve become so overstimulated by technology that we now need technology to help us relax.
A new category of “immersive wellness” is emerging, biometric-responsive lighting, synchronized sound, scent diffusion and it’s all designed to treat the frayed nerves and shrinking attention spans that, by no coincidence, the same technology helped create.
One facility opening in Austin will cover 25,000 square feet and read your body’s data in real time to deliver awe and transcendence on demand.
I don’t doubt it works. But I keep coming back to what it says about us that we need all of this to achieve something humans have managed since forever, sitting still, breathing, letting the mind settle.
A walk. Silence. A meal without a screen. These things are free, available everywhere, and they’ve been working for millennia. We’ve somehow made them feel insufficient.
The spa industry isn’t creating this problem. It’s just meeting the demand, which is what markets do. The real question is why we’ve let the conditions for natural restoration erode so completely that a 25,000 square foot immersive bathhouse starts to look like the reasonable option.
The WSJ piece on this is worth a read:
