Wellness Consumerism in Ubud, Bali

I spent a few weeks in Bali over the 2023-24 new year. I took the Conspirituality book with me for reading material, and boy didn’t that shit turn out to be #relevantcontent.

Wellness consumerism is all over Ubud. The operator of the place I was staying at took me on a tour around the rice paddies out the back of town. We passed more than one hippie wellness retreat as we walked, one big open-air studio space raised off the ground filled with middle-class Westerners doing Yoga early in the day being particularly memorable (Yoga is native to Bali, all the more reason to go to all the effort to go there). Around the village there are naturally also any number of ways to spend money on wellness; local entrepreneurs have clearly identified it as a growth sector, and business is booming.

One night I went to a something like a DIY social centre where I caught some local hip-hop and reggae acts. It was fucking rad. The bar had a big circle-a spraypainted in the back wall, so yours truly was right at home. None of this is local culture worth knowing anything about though. Over the road from that place was a major wellness consumerism temple, which I made a point of coming back to later, especially after reading a bit more of Conspirituality.

I ate at a warung over the road first, spending maybe AUD$4-5 bucks overall. I can’t eat tonnes anymore anyway, but it’s still very cheap and the food in warungs is never not really fucking good. Traveling is mostly about eating really imo. The amount I spent on lunch at a regular eating place is relevant when we see what they charge dumb as shit westerners to eat and drink their way out of their alienation or some shit.

Out the front for starters is a massive wall with all the paraphenalia for the local wellness industry; the entire wall was covered with glossy brochures. You can see it in the background of the photo above. They don’t fuck around.

It’s hard to look serious when you’re trying not to laugh

You have to take your shoes off when you go inside the wellness consumerism temple, as with any other religious centre. The inside of the place was filled with apparently affluent white people; you could just as easily be around the yoga hippies of Brighton or Bondi. It was a weird vibe, like people were going out of their way to be free having spent so much on the airfares to get to Bali in the first place. Which was even weirder since there was absolutely nothing in this joint that could conceivably be considered Balinese culture. They did have live music though (someone playing a sitar, would that I was making that up). Someone will have to explain to me one day how dancing around the floor of a restaurant in the middle of the day to sitar music makes you freer than anyone else.

I made a point of getting a photo of the drink prices, which were predictably hilarious. Again to put things in perspective, AUD$1 is about 13,000 Indonesian Rupiah. This is what you might pay for a glass of iced tea at a warung, like the one across the road from a wellness consumerism temple. My maths is pretty shit, but the best I can gather, the cost of one health drink at the wellness temple was around AUD$5. Recall again that this is about what I paid for an entire meal across the road. To help put things in perspective again, a pack of cigarettes in Bali costs around AUD$3-5 bucks. Wheatgrass is more expensive in Ubud than tobacco.

Suffice it to say there is no way known the ingredients for these drinks cost AUD$5. I can’t help but imagine personally the people running these places, the yoga retreats and whatnot, literally going down the back stairs of the yoga retreat, pulling a few blades of wheatgrass out of a crop next to the rice paddies right out back, and putting a 1000% markup on them for westerners who are not only dumb enough to pay inflated prices for wellness commodities at home, but to pay the same inflated prices in countries where their money has more spending power. Paying stupid prices for anything is a status boost for wankers; doubly so in a country where their home currency has more spending power.

Virtue-signalling capitalists do have a philosophy though, apparently:

Purity of essence isn’t a new idea:

Still from *Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb*. Purity, also good for paranoia

All the staff working in this consumerism temple were Balinese locals; I didn’t ask them what they were being paid, but I would bet my bottom dollar their wages weren’t as inflated as the prices of their menu items or the egos of people spending their money on good, healthy consumer durables, not bad, toxic consumer durables.

All in all my visit was very brief, long enough to grab a few photos and take note of the vibe, before exiting and putting my shoes back on. Bali has all sorts of cultural things going on that speak to its spirituality; around Ubud you can check any number of art galleries featuring local artists. Ubud runs its own writers festival. The place is peppered everywhere with statues and incredible architecture. Traditional dances run every night at the hindu temple in the centre of town to make sure every Joe and Jane Bloggs off the street are able to catch something they wouldn’t see elsewhere. I even caught legong shadow puppets one night. There are options other than the culturally-appropriated yoga you can get into at the local studio in Lilydale, in other words. It was definitely testament to the contents of Conspirituality to check first-hand the antics we get up to trying to have things both ways. It would be weird if consumerism itself was a source of personal alienation, wouldn’t it.