Humans have always been prone to tracking success. Bruce Lee used to manually log each kilogram on a piece of paper in pursuit of progressive overload. The instinct itself is not new, but what has changed is the technology surrounding it: smart watches, smart glasses, smart homes, smart scales—and, of course, smart phones.
Standard body composition scales differentiate your body fat from other tissues using Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA), our watches can measure blood pressure and glucose levels, and our phones can even track our steps just by nature of carrying it around all day. As the metrics become more specific, the body increasingly resembles something that can be optimised. We track our sleep, recovery and protein intake with the same rigour we curate our algorithms and digital feeds.
Words like “intention” and “practice” are becoming common vernacular when it comes to wellness, with search terms like “red-light therapy” “VO2 max” “oxygen tanks” joining the mix. Supplements are rebranded as matcha, ice cream arrives infused with whey, and Bloomberg recently reported that protein prices have surged by more than 50 per cent. Over in Silicon Valley, The San Francisco Standard has reported Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint Longevity Mix (an amino acid-, vitamin-, mineral-packed mocktail) being served in lieu of cocktails.
Bryan Johnson himself has become somewhat of a poster child for modern biohacking. Scour his Twitter for a few of his experiments: “I take Cialis, but not for sex”, “ketamine reverses biological age and depression”, and “I started milking my eyelids”. The statements are deliberately provocative, but they are attached to a project Johnson has reportedly invested more than US$2 million into. Though it appears as clickbait, his Longevity Blueprint and “don’t die” philosophy is working: at 48, which is more than half of the average lifespan, Johnson reportedly has the biomarkers of an eighteen year old.
a little something to take the edge off pic.twitter.com/N9UpT81uoJ
— Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) October 24, 2025
But it has to be emphasised that Johnson is someone who has dedicated his life to longevity. Having sold his company to PayPal for $800 million in 2013, Johnson has the means and willpower to stick to a rigorous diet, sit in an oxygen tank for 20 minutes a day, and even receive blood transfusions from his son to keep his plasma rejuvenated. But for someone working a 9-to-5, doing red light therapy, VO2 maxing, and the like is a matter of time restraint—and more than that, financially inaccessible.
Recently, Johnson has released a list of 41 things he learned in his longevity research. The list, surprisingly, didn’t contain any of the above mechanisms—but focused on the simpler things in life: achieving eight hours’ sleep, quitting sugar and alcohol, and limiting social media usage.
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Upgrade after upgrade
As someone prone to structuring her life around wellness, I have coincidentally become the target audience for the health industry’s optimisation-focused products. I already tongue scrape, go to the gym, play my fair share of team sports, and generally lead a life generally centred around wellness, as subjective as that may be. On my desk, you would find a 1.5L water bottle (refilled twice per day) and a protein shake (just one per day). I’ve even been prone to tracking my deep-to-light sleep ratio via Fitbit. And yet, it doesn’t feel like I was nor am doing enough. When Johnson turned longevity into an itemised list of 41 tasks, it was certainly intriguing.
And yet: 41 items felt too stressful, too large of a number. It wasn’t for lack of trying. A few items hit my downfall: caffeine, social media, sitting for long periods of time. In defence, as somebody working in the digital space, perhaps it was ironic that I was even attempting a social media cleanse (—whether it was to a professional or personal benefit that it did not work, that is TBD). Even going back to my Fitbit, I found it more addictive than optimising my sleep; reaching to check as soon as I woke up, slightly on an adrenaline rush to see if I had hit my target of nine hours, and certainly not relishing in the feeling of a good morning.
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If my body is rejuvenated, then why didn’t I feel like it? Somewhere along the way, wellness began to feel suspiciously similar to work. I became more interested in optimising wellness than experiencing it.
It seems a bit too obvious, but I realised that I had already been experiencing a healthy lifestyle, and in fact was ticking off more items on Johnson’s list than not—and by obsessing over optimising my wellness, fixating on what I was missing, and tracking my protein intake—I had accidentally induced more stress than if I had simply enjoyed my life.
My experiences reflect a broader fatigue surrounding optimisation culture. Though it has encouraged a healthier way of living, the joy of simply being has somehow been forgotten along the way. The Global Wellness Summit identified the “over-optimisation backlash” as a defining trend for 2026—a shift away from measurement, data and performance-driven wellness, and towards “joy, connection and embodied care”. In essence, social wellbeing; which has been forgotten amidst the algorithm-driven approach to health.
Designing projects over products
Brands are responding in kind. In Singapore, Virgin Active is rebranding from a gym into what it describes as a social wellness club. “The wellness conversation is changing in response to evolving consumer needs, and we are seeing a clear shift in how people define wellness across both Singapore and Thailand,” says Julien Bera, country director of Singapore and Thailand’s Virgin Active. In Singapore, their reaction to this growing change is more they’ve recently launched breathwork and sound bath sessions as part of their wider programming, as a reaction to this growing change. They have even introduced elements like co-working spaces into their gyms—slowly transitioning the gym into a community hub, the fabled third space.
The shift is reflective of an emerging trend within the wellness landscape. Increasingly, the focus appears to be less on products and optimisation, and more on creating environments—ecosystems, even—that facilitate rest, connection and belonging in-between the hustle culture.
Bathhouses like Nowhere Baths and Capybara, for instance, offer a slower, more intentional approach to wellbeing. These spaces create physical boundaries that encourage a moment of pause rather than productivity—with spaces designed in such that they are clear of clutter, and even mass decor. Nicole Chew, director of Capybara, explained this during a recent Vogue Singapore panel: “We don’t just remind people to slow down. It’s about giving them space to discover rest without guilt.”
The focus now appears to be creating spaces rather than products. Even at the recent Milan Design Week, my colleague in attendance noted that furniture was rarely presented as a standalone object, but as part of a wider project. The shift from product to ecosystem reflects the broader cultural appetite for connection—that the object itself was no longer the point, but the experience and interactions around it.
The irony of modern wellness culture is that the further it advances, the more it circles back to the basics. When stripped of its avant-garde, wellnessmaxxing branding, much of Johnson’s routine is remarkably ordinary: vegetables, exercise, sleep and consistency. His longevity meal consists largely of tomatoes, carrots, radishes and legumes. Of all the rules in Johnson’s blueprint, the last may be the most revealing: “Do less. Most things don’t work.”
