GLP-1 Gummies For My Inner Child
on the snackification of wellness
Because I engage with wellness product ads on Instagram—rage-screenshotting, rage-reposting, rage-commenting—I see a lot of them. I watch them change in response to consumer trends, a nauseous murmuration of buzzwords and 30%-off-your-first-order promotions. I scroll from an ad for Willow, an online purveyor of compounded semaglutide injections—the same active ingredients as Ozempic; programs that help even if you only want to lose a few pounds!—to an ad for the first-ever GLP-1 gummies. Compounded semaglutide in candy form for $296 per month.
I scroll on to an ad for Arrae creatine gummies—sculpt your sexy; designed for women (no bulk or bloating); not your boyfriend’s creatine. Then comes an ad for Grüns superfood gummies—Your daily greens made easy; why shake when you can snack; better poops in just 5 days.
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Observing the endless permutations of wellness consumables reminds me of Roland Barthes’ writing on the forms of things. How the physical forms of consumer products are essential to their mythologies: A detergent that foams is perceived as more penetrating and therefore more effective than a liquid detergent. A product made of plastic is more compelling than a product made of metal, since plastic is more than a substance, it is “the very idea of its infinite transformation.”
Plastic’s infinite potential to change forms makes plastic objects pleasurable to man, Barthes argues, “since the very itinerary of plastic gives him the euphoria of prestigious free-wheeling through Nature.”1
Barthes wrote on plastic in 1957, and I dare say its alchemical allure should have worn off since then. (Worn off into a trillion microscopic flecks, giving us cancer and colitis.) The seduction of transformation is still with us, though, as the prestige of subjugating nature has not faded. We are seduced by the idea that a salad can be dissolved into its nutrient components, those nutrients maximized and multiplied and pressed into a morsel of candy, packaged in plastic, shipped across land and sea to our doorstep, carrying not just the health benefits of a salad but the prestige of making life on Earth easy.
Similarly, transforming a drug from a clear injection to a bright red gummy allows the user to feel like a snacker—snacks being synonymous with abundance, snacking being the decadent and unserious sibling of subsisting—rather than a patient. Under end-stage capitalism, being a patient implies helplessness and a lack of agency, the humiliation of being taken advantage of. A gummy is soft and squishy, innocent and nonthreatening. It carries the whimsy of a time when we could eat nutrient-free treats without fear or guilt, when gaining weight meant getting big and strong, when paying bills and buying groceries were someone else’s problem.
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Helena Aeberli recently wrote on the “cult of the new fun drink,” observing that every trendy new drink has a function. While Coke is just tasty, energizing at most, its holier alternatives offer probiotics, adaptogens, nootropics, fiber, antioxidants, green caffeine rather than brown. These products communicate that drinking a little drink should be productive rather than just enjoyable, mirroring capitalist messaging about passive income, corporate efficiency and so on.
By offering “not just pleasure but a means to an end,” Aeberli writes, the proliferation of functional drinks signifies “the individual capacity for constant self-optimization, even in moments of rest and most particularly through mundane acts” like sipping a soda at work.
Transforming every tiny indulgence into an opportunity for self-optimization is the inversion of the gummy phenomenon, which is about turning the work of body control into a moment of ease and convenience. Both speak to our desire to have our cake and eat it, too, though there is a conspicuous lack of cake. When we hide snake oil in a tiny indulgence, it is no longer an indulgence. When we turn drugs into candy, they’re still drugs, and they’re definitely not candy.
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A memorable Dazed article from 2023 by James Greig declares, “We are a generation of adult babies.” The article concerns social media trends of self-infantilization that exploded during the COVID-19 lockdowns and have continued to proliferate since.2 Disney adults, “I’m just a girl,” toddler cosplaying to heal the inner child. “From a psychoanalytic perspective, self-infantilization makes uncannily good sense,” analyst and author Josh Cohen tells Dazed. “It is a kind of identification with one’s own powerlessness, and so gives it a veneer of active choice.”
I may never be able to own a home, and even if I were it could be destroyed by an off-season wildfire or freak inland hurricane at any time. But seeking control over the economy or climate is too hard, so let me seek self-control instead, imagining my body as the final frontier, the final boss in my quest to conquer nature. This inward turn is an abnegation of responsibility for everything bigger than me. The inward turn implies, “the only thing I have power over is myself, so I must wield that power as visibly and meticulously as I can.”
The wellness industry drapes this body control imperative with nostalgia and whimsy, making it feel like leisure instead of work. To make self-discipline sweet. To make wasting the power of our desire for transformation on wellness rather than revolution somehow rewarding. Greig wrote, “Children are the perfect customers: suggestible, impulsive, driven by an insatiable and replenishable desire for pleasure.” Since buying shit is pleasurable and pleasure appears to be scarce in this world-on-fire, the idea that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” has morphed into “there is no unethical consumption under capitalism.”
Cohen adds, “[Self-infantilization] takes an acute loss of agency and control and transforms it into a state to be desired and enjoyed. Once you embrace this way of being, the demands and rewards of adult life are going to seem all the more remote and all the more forbidding and unpleasurable.”
Turning body control into a tempting little treat fails to satisfy both the child’s hedonism and the adult’s need for security, and vice versa. What we’re getting is a false sense of control and fake sugar; what we’re not getting is actual care or actual pleasure. What we need is both. Pleasure-in-care is that thing that our unconscious is crying out for, and we’re giving it products instead.
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As I grapple for concrete ways to shift health discourses away from total self-dominion toward communal, de-commodified care, I’m reminded of a Mental Hellth essay from 2022 (that I was stunned to realize is also by James Greig.) The essay concerns the cultural shift toward blaming depression and anxiety on superstructures rather than individual things like unlucky brain chemistry or lackluster self-care habits.
It’s important to think critically about what things people have agency over, and what it would mean to expand the field of individual and collective agency, rather than accepting the Haig/Peterson version (you can change anything) or the nihilistic structural version (you can’t change anything.) If the likes of Haig and Peterson are offering people a form of individual aspiration, what might a more collective version of that look like? There must be a way of recognizing that, yes, the world really is this bad, without excusing ourselves of individual responsibility to change it, and to strive for a fulfilling life.
The uncanny childishness of some new wellness products and how they’re advertised makes me suspect that, collectively, we feel more powerless than we’re willing to admit, or even consciously understand. We are invited to take total responsibility for every detail of our biology and simultaneously tempted to escape responsibility into a hedonistic pseudo-childhood. Effective responses to feelings of helplessness, i.e. actually expanding the field of individual and collective agency rather than playing at being both mommy and baby, involve care structures that both acknowledge our lack of control and create space where power and pleasure grow together. I love you, so I love taking care of you. I love you, so I love fighting for you.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957.
I’m not interested in criticizing women for indulging in pink bows and junk journals and plastic keychains, as many of us feel safe to enjoy the aesthetic and tactile pleasures of girlhood as adults in ways we were not as children. I believe we are successfully protecting these simple pleasures from the forces angling to make them functional—beyond the life-giving function of joy, of course—and must continue to do so.