If the harsh life of our grandparents becomes a wellness trend

I have two very different grandmothers. There's the town grandma, a former municipal employee, always fresh from the hair salon and dressed in skirt-suit ensembles, with a makeup obsession and a passion for skincare. She wore a miniskirt in the Seventies, drawing looks and ire from her fellow villagers. Then there's the countryside grandma, a diligent dog trainer and lettuce planter, who I've never seen wearing anything other than loose trousers and comfortable shoes. She used to bake bread, with her only vanity being a bit of pearl nail polish on her nails. The first one can't cook, while the second prepares unforgettable dishes. Today, her somewhat complex, undoubtedly rural life, with her hands in the soil and meat, has become a wellness trend—or rather, a multitude of micro wellness trends promising perfectly polished mental health, much like our rain boots when visiting a charming little barn.

From Cottagecore to Trad Wife in a Heartbeat

Some people knead fresh pasta to find peace of mind, or feed ducks to reconnect with Mother Earth. Some fantasize about founding a commune to quit their jobs, live off the land, raising rabbits and piglets. Others, deep in burnout, keep exclaiming that they want to move to the countryside, up in the mountains, to drop everything and live in a cave. The aesthetic we imagine for this bucolic lifestyle—woven baskets with bows, floral dresses, cascades of wheat-colored hair, and leather sandals—has conquered social networks, entered street style, and even made its way onto the runways, inevitably and insidiously linking itself to another movement: the call to a return to traditional living (whatever that means), featuring fertile mothers promoting their lifestyle on TikTok, working husbands, high-end kitchen gadgets worth thousands of dollars, conservative ideals, and vast tracts of land for grazing cows. This is the case with Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith.

Are We Fetishizing Poverty?

It's fine to fantasize, but charging money for a mountain retreat or a manure-shoveling class (or sniffing wheat fields) with the promise of restoring calm, tranquility, and well-being to our weary minds is another story. The operation is always the same: take something our grandmothers did out of necessity, empty it of its meaning, distance it from the reality of life, from the dirt, exhaustion, and stench of humble and poor living, and turn it into a trend. It's cleaned up and fetishized. What do we gain? Less money in our pockets, a distorted sense of what it means to work with your hands in the countryside, and a subtle sense of superiority because what is the reality for millions worldwide becomes, for us, a whim, a capricious wellness experience we can start and stop whenever we want, one that doesn't determine our survival. We become annoying cosplayers of humility and simple, sincere living, naively and unrealistically believing our grandparents were happy with themselves because they breathed fresh air. We don't care about the 4 a.m. wake-ups, the milking, the butchering, the sweat, the bad work conditions and the back pain because it doesn't affect us.

A Problem of Disconnect from Life’s Materiality

Michael Pollan, in his book Cooked, which delves into cooking techniques and the relationship between food, cooking, and the evolution of humanity, discusses the concept of de-responsibilization. According to him, relying on ready meals and stopping cooking detaches us too much from the reality of food's origins, which can be messy and unpleasant. In a way, the same might apply to our nature cooking classes or the lettuce-picking experiences in the Tuscan countryside that we pay handsomely for, while laborers die in the fields across Italy and the world. The tough life isn't a trend; it's the reality of a divided world where office workers remain ignorant, uninterested, and unwilling to see what happens in the primary sector, to the extent that they can extract the most romantic bits, wrap them in ribbons, and sell them. And pity those who actually have to do it for real.