Weeks ago, a Twitter user complained regarding how much she hated the formality of “Everything okay? Yes, everything is fine”, to greet each other, because there is nothing more false: never, ever is “everything fine”, 100%.
And less than less in the last three years, where the pandemic and its associated crises caused a true cataclysm in terms of well-being. Not only in the absolute numbers of deaths from Covid (which according to a recent study published in The Lancet were triple the official figure: 18.2 million deaths globally instead of six million), but also because of the diseases that were left untreated and the effects of long quarantine on mental health. The World Economic Forum estimated the costs of mental challenges by 2030 at more than six trillion (millions of millions) of dollars. In some developed countries, mental health problems already exceed physical ones as a cause of inability to work.
Wanting to feel good was always important, but with the pandemic it became a more intense imperative. Because we are more aware of our fragility (we all have a friend or family member who had a bad time with Covid) and also because the quarantine generated a kind of “collective introspection” to re-evaluate the balance between work and free time.
In this context, there is some very good news for the wellness agenda. On one side, never in history have we seen such an acceleration of changes and advances in the so-called “life sciences” (biotechnology, precision medicine, science of wellness habits, etc). The great stories of innovation from 2020 to now have to do with this field: how vaccines were created ten times faster, in some cases with entirely new technology (Pfizer and Moderna’s messenger RNA), and then also manufactured at unprecedented speed (when in biotechnology there is a big problem of “scalability”).
The Argentine biotechnologist Diego Miralles, CEO of Laronde -a US East Coast drug discovery company valued at more than a billion dollars- recently commented that if someone was told in 2019 what would happen to anti-Covid strategies would have thought he was crazy: “That’s true science fiction, you don’t have to go to the stories of Mammoths regenerated by gene editing” (something that, by the way, is already seriously considered doing: the company Colossal Biosciences raised for this purpose 75 million dollars).
Miralles spoke regarding these issues last month in a talk for the launch of a new fund for biotechnology projects (SF500) together with Argentine basketball player Juan Ignacio “Pepe” Sánchez, an authority in Latin America on welfare. Pepe, who will be part of this new space in La Nación with regular columns, usually emphasizes the battle of habitsthat thing we do on autopilot and that represents more than 50% of the decisions we make every day.
For the former point guard of the Golden Basketball Generation, healthy habits have, like investments, “compound interest”: the sooner we start them the better. And it all adds up: a common mistake is to fall into the binary thinking that either we are super-athletes or we are a disaster, with nothing in between. The second piece of good news (in addition to the huge advances in medicine and biotech) is that it is easier to change our habits when we go through an “earthquake of habits” (massive consumer companies know, for example, that we are more likely to change toothpaste brands in the middle of a move, birth of a child, divorce, etc.). And in this sense, the quarantine was an earthquake of habits of 9 degrees on the Richter scale.
With new topics such as the sleep industry, sex, the breaking of old taboos that are allowed once more (cannabis, psychedelics) and the nascent sector of extreme “longevity” start-ups, among others, the new wellness agenda gain prominence at an accelerated pace. It is true that “everything is fine”, as in the joke in the first paragraph, but the litany of “… Or do you want me to tell you?” is not imposed either.