YOU CAN'T OPTIMIZE YOURSELF INTO IMMORTALITY
Derek Beres was fully immersed in the American wellness industry for decades, teaching thousands of yoga and fitness classes in New York and Los Angeles. Seeking refuge from crippling panic attacks and a 15-year struggle with disordered eating, he explored extreme diets, spiritual practices, and alternative medicine. But as a kid in New Jersey who suffered multiple injuries (and ended up working in an emergency room), he could never square wellness's magical thinking problem.
Well Enough is an unapologetic memoir that tracks the devolution of wellness from a pursuit of holistic health into a multi-trillion-dollar purity hustle. Beres exposes the staggering hypocrisy of a culture obsessed with optimization, where influencers sell untested supplements while demonizing public health and evidence-based medicine. When Covid-19 accelerated the wellness-to-right-wing pipeline, culminating in the rise of the MAHA movement, Beres realized his peers' rejection of science wasn't just absurd-it was a political and physical danger.
A lived reminder that you cannot optimize yourself into immortality, sometimes you just have to realize that well enough is, in fact, enough.
About the Author
Derek Beres is an author, speaker, and co-host of the Conspirituality podcast. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Time, Playboy, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
