‘The White Lotus” Focus on the Pitfalls of Wellness Is Hitting a Little Too Close to Home

The guests kick off their week with a slew of personally tailored itineraries. The Raitliffs are assigned individualized wellness programs, save for the dad, Timothy, who asked to spend his entire vacation at the gym. Of course, his actual workout comes from running to the parking lot to take phone calls about the unfolding money laundering scheme he’s been implicated in. It’s certainly elevated his heart rate. On the opposite end of the heart rate spectrum, mom, Victoria, has effectively lowered hers by popping so many benzos she’s practically in a sensory deprivation tank of her own making.

Chelsea opts for a body scrub and waxing—maybe she’s trying to rid herself of Rick’s existential funk—and forces Rick to attend a stress management session. While I assume his bank account has a heavy influence, I have yet to be fully convinced why she’s with this man; I find Rick to be rather unsympathetic. Even when we learn about his traumatic childhood (a drug-addicted mother and a father who was murdered before he was born), I couldn’t bring myself to feel much compassion for this inhospitable man. His spiel on his identity, or lack thereof (“If nobody puts gas in the tank, the car won’t start,”) didn’t do much to move my needle on him.

My favorite guests, the trio of longtime friends, all had their biometric markers read by the hunky Russian, Valentin. A triangle might be the strongest shape in nature, but socially it couldn’t be weaker. Despite strong biomarkers across the board (even Kate’s devastating “average” numbers aren’t really that bad), it took about five minutes and a glass of sauvignon blanc to get these women to start talking shit about one another. Jaclyn and Kate worry that Laurie’s laser focus on her career has panned out to a dissatisfying life. Kate and Laurie feel Jaclyn doth fawn too much over her younger husband (“She says they’re addicted to each other, but are they ever even in the same city?”). And while Laurie and Jaclyn haven’t had a private moment together, there’s a lot about Kate’s life of alleged domestic bliss in Austin worth picking apart until it bleeds. This entire dynamic, fitted in its finest athleisure, is delectable.

The luxury treatments are only matched in excessiveness by these characters’ neuroses. It’s nothing new for the series, but what does feel poignant, like I mentioned, is the backdrop of wellness at a time when, in real life, it’s impossible to escape fitness influencers peddling detox teas and protein supplements between writing fan fiction about our new Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. So far, there’s been no mention of seed oils or raw milk (and hopefully won’t be), still, the guests at the White Lotus are living out the aspirational MAHA fantasy—whole foods, daily step counts, digital detox, and biomarker testing by hottie Valentin. In the story playing out on our TV screens though, we get a full picture of how full of shit it is. 

Plus, their ability to live this lifestyle isn’t a strong will or a pursuit of health, it’s being comfortably situated in a high enough tax bracket where the only concrete jobs I’m aware that any of them have are “famous actress” and “stressed out money launderer.” A begrudging dinner conversation between Rick and Greg (ahem, I mean “Gary”) shows the two men bonding over a career of doing “this and that.” While we don’t know exactly what that means for Rick, we know that “Gary’s” “career” involves collecting inheritance from his wife he killed last season. (RIP Tanya.)

Individualized wellness might take some years off your biomarkers but what else does it save you from? In Victoria’s case, not drug addiction. In Rick’s case, not anger levels high enough to require medical intervention by a resort doctor. And, as we saw in the main plot point of the episode, not gun violence. These rich folks can sandblast their faces and lock themselves in both real and metaphorical sensory deprivation chambers as much as they’d like, but wellness focused solely on the individual body and not a larger collective won’t protect them from the ills of society.