There’s a growing response to achievement culture, especially among younger adults who are working less, demanding more flexibility, preferring hybrid or remote work, and seeking more vacation time. Many are willing to take lower pay in exchange for better work-life balance. They want freedom and better mental health. They value experiences over achievement. There’s a lot of good desires behind this perspective. It’s attempting to correct what achievement culture has distorted. You could call this a secular Sabbath—“secular” because the goal of well-being culture is self-fulfillment: freedom and experience, life as something enviable rather than meaningful. This conflicts with the holiness of the Sabbath. A life driven by self-fulfillment cannot, at the same time, be driven by obedience to God.
The Sabbath has two tensions:
1. It resists the restrictive, diminishing demands of overwork: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Well-being culture gets this emphasis right. We should not work in a way that diminishes our lives and steals our joy.
2. Sabbath also calls for self-denial: “It is a day of sabbath rest, and you must deny yourselves” (Leviticus 16:31 NIV, emphasis mine). Well-being culture misses this. A life aimed at self-fulfillment ends up just as restless—just as diminished.
The problem with well-being culture is not its diagnosis—mental, emotional, and physical health are real needs. The issue is that it lacks a coherent vision of what well-being actually is. For every perceived need, there is a product to purchase. If you need better mental health, there’s therapy. Want to get in shape? Buy a gym membership, hire a trainer, download an app. Want better nutrition? Subscribe to a meal plan or pay for a coach. There’s a subscription for everything, but none of these industries has an endpoint. There is no destination—only ongoing maintenance.
Comedian Liz Glazer tells the story of being in therapy for seventeen years. After claiming this fact, the crowd cheers, affirming the good that therapy provides and the courage to spend that much time on herself. She goes on to say, “People tell you, don’t screw up your kids because they’ll have to go to therapy. But I love therapy! It’s my favorite hour of the week. Therapy is a party, and the theme is me. I love it! I live my entire life, weaving together a narrative into an episode of television that I present to Dr. Weisberg at 11:10 a.m. where I have been going for seventeen years.”
The bit is actually pretty funny, and to be clear, we think therapy is a good thing and often refer folks in our community to mental health experts and therapists when the difficulties go beyond our competencies. But where Glazer finds herself, therapy had become an expensive replacement for friendship and community—and tragically, there was no real vision for her well-being. Just a weekly invitation to talk about herself.
Since the goals of well-being are often unclear, we resort to comparison: How am I doing? Am I emotionally balanced enough? Am I in shape enough? Am I eating the right things? Am I traveling to the right places? Do I have the right opinions? These questions are often answered by scrolling through curated content, driven by algorithms designed to keep us looking and never feeling well enough.
We’re fed endless visions of what’s wrong with us—unmet standards, untraveled destinations, unachieved lives, providing an ever-growing market of options to purchase, consume, and experience. Fundamentally, well-being culture denies (or at least attempts to ignore) the reality of death and aging, the deterioration of our body and mind. But aging and death are inevitable. Our bodies will break down. Yet well-being culture combats this with marketing slogans like “age is just a number” and just provides more products to purchase. Our coming death and experience of aging makes all this an endless treadmill demanding new financial deposits.
In 2023, the wellness app industry generated a billion dollars, a number almost five times its revenue in 2016. And yet, despite this overwhelming focus, mental health—especially among young adults—is in crisis. A Cigna study revealed that young adults feel far more isolated and lonely than their older coworkers. Seventy-three percent reported sometimes or always feeling alone, with alarming rates of depression and suicidal thoughts, especially among young women. Our modern vision of self-care is often dependent on consuming the products the market provides. Alan Noble argues that our culture is:
marked by unrestrained desire and consumption. Either we desire greater heights of self-mastery and excellence, or ever more entertainment and pleasure (also experiences). The market is happy to aid us in these quests. But unlimited desire and consumption always leave us exhausted and empty. There is always more to buy, always some way to improve, always something else to watch, always something else to try. To cope with our exhaustion and emptiness, we self-medicate. (Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World [InterVarsity Press, 2021], 4)
In well-being culture, freedom is idealized as the highest good. Anything that might get in the way of my freedoms—even things like friendships, marriage, children, aging parents—become negotiable. Often the result is that any commitment or relationship that demands we sacrifice our personal autonomy is viewed as a threat to my well-being. Jean Twenge argues that many young adults have traded healthy and meaningful relationships for short-term, positive emotions (Jean M. Twenge, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—And What They Mean for America’s Future [Atria Books, 2023], 250). The result, unsurprisingly, is soaring levels of loneliness and depression (Generations, 333-41).
Cynthia was expressing some doubts about her faith in pastoral counseling. “I have a friend at work who is a Buddhist and he seems so much more balanced and less anxious. His life seems to be put together and not bothered by the stress that the rest of us at work are feeling. And I can’t help but wonder if his spirituality is deeper than mine.” While we don’t personally share in our friend’s doubts, we can feel the pull of this temptation. You look at the lives of others and see their public virtue and displays of competence and confidence. What are they doing differently? What’s their morning routine? And when our culture teaches us that this balance and well-being is the point of our life, we can wonder if we are fundamentally doing something wrong.
It’s important to note that the goal of keeping a Sabbath or any kind of formation practice is not balance or well-being. In fact, if following Christ means “picking up our cross” it will likely mean disorienting experiences. The cross is often destabilizing, rather than balancing. Well-being culture doesn’t work in a life where I must also die to self.
If achievement culture is a slave to industry, well-being culture is a slave to self. Both are slave masters, disguised as abolitionists. Both demand bricks without straw.
Taken from The Sabbath We Need by John Starke and Jena Starke. ©2026 by John Starke and Jena Starke. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.