The curious case of mental wellness in digital India: navigating a viscous irony of thick centeredness and thin novelty
Rajan Luthra
Doomscrolling, constant connectedness, and over-stimulation erode one’s peace of mind. Brain-rot is real, accentuating the need for mental wellness and selfcare.
Responding to this gap is a rapidly growing wellness lifestyle industry, ironically, sprouting in the same digital landscape. It promises to “unlock inner peace”, addressing stress, anxiety, emotional numbness and more.
There are compelling consequences for brands and the industry, for the cultural lifestyle and for overall human wellness – to achieve optimum viscosity!
Clog of Hyper-redundancy: This digital-led wellness economy, collectively, ends up mirroring the very problem it sought to solve – creating choice paralysis. Is the ease of endless options fueling constant switching, turning wellness into overwhelm?
Plug &Play Mindfulness vs a Way of Life: New wellness brands speak a language of ease, access, and guaranteed impact – a sticky, consumerist tone. They sell wellness as an easy plug in for one’s routines. But do they risk becoming too thin (“ten-minute gratitude”) over thick substance (rituals), with no deep shifts?
The Viscous Paradox: This space is a negotiation of viscous flow. Wellness solutions must create thickness (discipline, meaning) using thin, high-velocity mediums (apps, social media), inevitably leading to a paradox where the medium could negate the message.
Rajan Luthra
Rajan’s work focuses on brand strategy and consumer insights. Lucky, work allows him to trace human stories across geographies… from understanding Cambodian Gen Z: a switch generation shedding Khmer Rouge trauma, to decoding the fuzzy subject of empathy in India. Mapping a slippery spectrum of appropriateness on TikTok in the Philippines or why content creators fumble with platforms’ community guidelines. He currently co-leads the Southeast Asia qualitative business for Toluna consumer research.