Beyond Amazon, Zoom, and Pfizer, Covid has turned out to be an incredible boon for a very particular sector – and, surprisingly enough, it isn’t the makers of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Health and wellness apps, who have successfully parlayed their message of relaxation, mindfulness, and smartphone-driven care into tens of millions of dollars in revenue and venture capital amidst the unprecedented mental strain of successive lockdowns on white-collar workers across the planet, have undoubtedly proven to be one of the winners of the pandemic.

With gyms closed down by the virus, health and fitness app downloads shot up 46% globally during the first wave last year and by as much as 157% in India. The meditation app Calm registered $8.5 million USD in revenue in April 2020 alone, while its competitor Headspace brought in $5.5 million.

By the end of 2020, Calm had secured a $2 billion valuation, driven by over 100 million downloads and 4 million paying customers. In February 2019, the number of customers had stood at just one million.

Missing the dysfunctional forest for the trees

As a sobering entry by Jenna Wortham for the New York Times laid out earlier this year, however, the lofty promises being made by these apps - of which there are hundreds of thousands, with Calm, Headspace, and exercise apps like MyFitnessPal merely being the most successful – is fundamentally misleading. While these companies claim to offer answers to individual anxiety, malaise, and sedentary lifestyles, the last two years have shown us that the root causes of these challenges are not individual. Instead, they are systemic.

Indeed, the pandemic has shed a harsh light on the cruel misalignment between – on the one hand – the ideas of wellness being hawked by these apps and increasingly taken up by corporations looking to mitigate the business impact from exhausted, burned-out employees and – on the other – the real mental and emotional needs of human beings who have never been more connected to digital services and content and yet less able to connect to their own families, friends, and communities.

Just as importantly, this new and expanding universe of health and wellness applications and platforms, focused as they are on the individual, entirely neglect the dovetailing environmental and societal crises that are adding so much additional stress to an already traumatic time.

In her piece for the New York Times, Jenna Wortham quotes disability advocate Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who wrote in her 2018 book “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice” that our society must shift from our reactive handling of health emergencies to a more proactive approach to care equipped for “centring sustainability, slowness and building for the long haul.”

New offerings centre ethics and sustainability

This oversight on the part of Big Wellness is not going unanswered. A new generation of platforms is now striving to replace the sometimes poignant, but often vacuous and even harmful content currently being fed to tens of millions of people by the online “health and wellness” ecosystem with something more fundamentally meaningful and impactful.

France’s Mentors, whose co-founders include the former cycling champion and journalist Erwan Menthéour and former attorney Jean-Pascal Pham-Ba, is an example of this new trend in action. As Menthéour told the French business platform Entreprendre last week: “Our ‘modern’ lifestyles are bad for the individual... societies... and the planet. We are mass-producing chronic physical and mental illness by way of systems that break down societies, that overexploit, and that pollute our environments.”

Taking inspiration from Cynthia Fleury, the French philosopher and psychoanalyst whose work on both the individual and collective impact of the pandemic has illustrated the linkages between personal well-being and the health of societies, Menthéor and Pham-Ba made clear to Entreprendre that their approach to issues of health and wellness is fundamentally different from that being taken by the thousands of smartphone apps currently dominating the narrative.

As Pham-Ba put it: “the demand we’re responding to – for sustainable well-being – is one that has not been answered up until today. Mentors is the first ‘sustainable well-tech,” a hybrid individual and collective tool... and a French and European technology that carries with it ethical and social values and expectations, particularly when it comes to personal data and impact.”

By breaking out of the individualised “silo” approach taken by most other apps thus far, the founders of Mentors say their message to users is to see their individual well-being as part of a wider transition towards a sustainable way of living that bases itself on ethical values, strengthens social bonds, and respects the environment around us – all factors which impact our wellbeing in turn.

If emerging initiatives like Mentors can shift the individualistic narrative surrounding health and wellness, there is hope that our hyper-connected, pandemic-fatigued societies can recognise the lessons Covid has offered us – not just about our approaches to work, entertainment, and social proximity (or distance), but also about our relationships with the communities we are a part of and the planet we live on.