Wellknowlogy: 11/23/22

Using training wheels correctly: awareness in wellness tech

Author

Dayton Simenz
November 23, 2022

Wellknowlogy is a curious, honest, and caring source of weekly news & thoughts on innovations in the wellness industry; an efficient way for providers, technologists, investors, and enthusiasts to stay in sync and informed about endeavors to increase wellbeing. For more context surrounding Wellknowlogy, the motives behind it, and its purpose, check out Why Wellknowlogy. For filtered information concerning your particular venture, reach out to [email protected]

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As you may have noticed, investment in the health and wellness space is not slowing down. In fact, as is reaffirmed by the H&W sector's domination of this past week in funding and the emergence of multiple unicorn valuations, it seems to only be gaining steam.

I am grateful that people are putting considerable resources behind ventures intended to produce higher levels of health and wellbeing. I am also wary of the ways that a company's (and investor's) motivation to grow its company rapidly may not align with the practices that will produce the best outcomes for its customers.

One potential consequence of hyper-growth aspirations that jumps out to me is the possible desire to flatten measures of wellbeing to reductive metrics. Here's an example of this:

A meditation app is seeking ways to communicate its value to consumers and investors. The people in charge decide that time spent meditating is a good metric to capture the company's value, showing investors that the company is producing value in a way that will inspire growth while showing consumers that this app will make their life better by helping them meditate more...

I have nothing against the idea of people meditating more or the situation described above. Companies should figure out ways to communicate their value; it benefits everyone involved. However, there is a possible scenario that extends from the example above that gives me pause:

As a result, the meditation app takes drastic measures to improve time spent meditating. They seek to make meditation more comfortable and enjoyable by adding music, narration by famous voice actors, and digital badges to reward their meditators. People will use this more because the experience is inherently enjoyable: customers will feel affirmed for meditating, advertising will become easier as they can promise value in time spent meditating, and investors will continue investing because of this rapid growth. Sure the Buddha might not recognize the behaviors of these users as real meditation but he's dead, so who cares.

At this point, the app functions less like a good tool and more like a crutch, as users are at risk of losing sight of the broader goal of meditation while relying on the app as a way to tell themselves: look at me, I am meditating. At this point, the app is essentially a set of training wheels that didn't include instructions to remove them from the bike.

All this is to say, be mindful of your intentions in your practice (meditation, nutrition, sleep, exercise...) and the ways that the tool or service you use to support it may have different intentions than yours. With this awareness, you can use these terrific tools while mitigating the risk of them becoming terrible masters.

With that out of the way, here's what happened last week:

Neat Articles

Market News

Fundings

New funds:

Tidbits for You and Yours

Closing Kernel of Wisdom

  • A great, short read on gratitude by Nick Lynch, founder of Superb Health. Getting past intellectualized gratitude and breaking into the core feeling is a game changer that is worth a try this Thanksgiving. If you want a bit more than the taste offered below, check out the piece here.

"When you’re in a state of gratitude it’s like being in-love. You really see what you have and are filled up with so much joy! You feel like you have no wants, needs, desires and temptations. You feel content! Living in a culture that values more, and when you get more, you should strive for more, it’s not easy to BE grateful. It’s easy to express gratitude for something, because it’s a transaction. If we’re not careful, all our life becomes one big transaction including our relationships with those around us and even more dangerous, ourselves! "

You got to the end! Nice. I don't charge for this, but if you value this enough to give me money, feel free to do so — my venmo is @dsimenz. Also, please forward this to anyone that may appreciate it. I'll give them a button below to check out previous emails and add them to the list:

Wishing you a great week to come.

Warmly,

Dayton