Somewhere along the way, wellness decided to be serious.
It aligned itself with discipline and science and self-improvement. It associated itself with early mornings, cold showers, and the peculiar satisfaction of doing things your body doesn't enjoy for reasons your spreadsheet approves of. Wellness became, in many of its most visible forms, a kind of controlled suffering in service of a better future self.
And it worked — for a while, for a certain kind of person, for a certain kind of market.
But I want to ask a different question: what if pleasure has always been the more powerful biological lever?
Not pleasure as indulgence — not as the thing you earn after doing the hard work — but pleasure as the mechanism through which the nervous system says, quite specifically: this is worth repeating. Stay alive for more of this.
The science on this is unambiguous and largely ignored by an industry that has built its identity around restraint. Positive experiences lower cortisol and inflammation. They strengthen immunity. They improve cardiovascular and metabolic function. Pleasure reinforces behaviour — not through willpower or discipline, but through the kind of neurochemical reward that makes habits sustainable over years rather than weeks.
Here is the observation that I cannot shake: other industries figured this out before we did.
Gaming companies have engineered experiences that activate dopamine at intensities comparable to sexual pleasure. Food companies spent decades perfecting the bliss point — the precise ratio of sugar, fat and salt that the brain finds irresistible. Social media platforms built anticipation loops so finely tuned that entire populations check their phones before they are fully awake.
These are not neutral observations. These industries did something wellness should have been doing from the beginning: they studied what humans actually want, at a biological level, and they built for that. The difference — and it is a significant one — is intention. They built for compulsion and dependency. Wellness could build for something entirely different: pleasure in the service of genuine health. Not as a compromise, but as the mechanism.
I have been developing this thinking under the name Pleasure Health, and I spoke about it at the Global Wellness Summit in Dubai in 2025 — not because it was a comfortable idea to put in front of a serious scientific audience, but precisely because it wasn't. The argument is simple enough that it should not need making: when wellness feels like punishment, people drop out. When it feels beautiful, meaningful, joyful and embodied, they stay. Not because they have more willpower, but because the experience is meeting them where human biology actually lives.
This is not an argument against rigour. RoseBar Longevity — the medical clinic I co-founded at Six Senses Ibiza — is built on serious science. But the most technically advanced protocol in the world fails if the person sitting across from you does not want to come back.
What would it look like for an organisation to design pleasure into its wellness offering with the same care it brings to its clinical protocols? Not as decoration — as architecture. What would it look like to treat the felt experience of being alive as a measurable health outcome?
I think that is one of the most interesting design questions available to this industry right now. And the response I have had to the idea — from practitioners, from scientists, from clients — suggests it names something people have been feeling for a long time without quite having the language for it.
People do not want to be improved. They want to feel alive.
Wellness has always known this, in its better moments. The science is now catching up with what the best practitioners have understood intuitively for decades. The next era belongs to the organisations brave enough to build for it.