#75 | Shvitzing is a Naked Activity

A Bathing Suit is fine, but headphones in the Sauna? The Wellness Industry has gone too far.

It is reported that the Global Wellness industry is valued at $6.3 TRILLION. If that number on it’s own doesn’t shock you, consider that the Global Pharmaceutical industry is valued at $1.6 TRILLION.

The Wellness Industry (capitalization required) has no governing body making it a lawless playground of moon powders, rage influencers, and tech bros microdosing their way through existential dread. You’ve got men like Liver King claiming their ancestral diets are the secret to a jacked physique… while secretly spending $11,000 a month on steroids. You’ve got anti-vaxxers suggesting cancer can be healed with sunlight and foot soaks. You’ve got powders for every organ, taping your mouth shut to “reset” your nervous system, and, this is real, people drinking their own menstrual blood. We’re beyond parody, we’ve lost the plot. We have found ourselves in the era of Wellness Maximalism.

Listen, WHO AM I TO JUDGE? I say this not as an outsider but as a card-carrying participant. My doctor prescribes me bitters, trace minerals, Goldenseal, and Ashwagandha. I sage my house. I take magnesium to sleep. There is nothing that makes me feel better than a tiny little micro dose of psilocybin. I still carry a selenite stone from the moon ceremony we had at my bachelorette. I was buying smudge sticks when I was eleven at the health food store in Portsmouth, when health food stores still smelled like health food stores (YOU KNOW THE SMELL) and long before “clean beauty” was a marketing category. I’m not above it. I am wellness-adjacent. Probably even wellness-susceptible. I mean, Cult Leader is my dream job after all.

Though I don’t have a leg to judge on, I can still be annoyed. What bothers me isn’t that wellness exists. It’s that it’s no longer possible to just you know - be well. To live in a way we already know is good for us, move your body, eat food that doesn’t make you feel like trash, sleep a little, without feeling like we’re failing for not stacking efficiently or optimizing every breath. Wellness has become performance art.

The place I find this most apparent and absolutely most personally offensive may surprise you. It’s not the powders or the crystals or the “sunshine first thing in the morning will cure everything.” It’s sweaty gym clothes in the sauna. It’s sneakers in the steam room. It’s the appropriation of a ritual into a heavily optimized part of a wellness stack. This is where Wellness Maximalism hurts me the most:

The TikTokification of the Shvitz.

Let’s back up. Intentional sweating is not a new idea. Turkish hammams, Korean jjimjilbang, Aztec temezcal, Finnish saunas, Japanese Sento (one of my favorite books growing up had a page about Sento and I was hooked from them on) - a lot of cultures have their own version.

My bloodline, the pure Eastern European Ashkenazi Jew, is no exception. We had the banya. I’m well aware I wouldn’t have been allowed in the Russian bathhouses of yore (ladies’ nights existed even then), but the cultural imprint is real. Shvitzing is in the blood. In the bones. In the chlorine scented tile.

Banyas weren’t “recovery modalities.” They were where life happened. You sweated. You kibbitzed. You ate pickled fish and maybe played a little pinnochle. The best banyas smell like smoked meat, chlorine, and cigarettes. They’re damp, democratic spaces where the goal isn’t betterment. It’s just… being human.

This is the banya we go to these days. Chlorine, Cigarettes and Borscht...

Many bathhouses served functional needs: Jewish immigrants in New York and New Jersey didn’t have indoor plumbing, so they went to literally bathe. And of course, at the time, Jews had to make do with whatever Jewish-owned spaces they had access to, because just like today*, they weren’t welcome everywhere. So these bathhouses became cultural gathering spaces as much as they were places to get clean. Most of the time they were men only, with women-specific hours (broader hours for women if the bathhouse had a mikveh).

These bathhouses became the center of business. You ate a meal, played a game of cards, and made deals. Abner “Longey” Zwillman, the Jewish mob boss, is said to have frequented the Newark baths with his associates, arriving in a chauffeured Cadillac. This is back when business was CIVILIZED, you guys. He didn’t need an LED light mask or a lymphatic drainage paddle. He needed heat, a small towel, and plausible deniability. Same, Longey, Same.

Of course, these bathhouses weren’t free of folklore. Cupping, Leeching, Platza (where you are beaten with oak leaves in very hot steam rooms) - all of these things were said to heal anything that ailed you. The Wellness Maximalism of yesteryear, maybe?

You can trace a direct line from the Jewish bathhouses in North Jersey in the 1920s and 30s to the metropolitan sports clubs of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. This is a lineage of heat, honesty, and half-naked dealmaking. The steam room became the extension of the boardroom, a place to sweat out stress, close deals, maybe confess the kinds of things you wouldn’t say with your clothes on. There was a rhythm to it. You lifted weights or played squash, then you rinsed off and sat in the shvitz. Maybe you gossiped about a merger. Maybe you agreed to send over a proposal. This was where business got real. No pleasantries, no pretense: just sweaty men in tiny towels deciding whether the deal was going to close. The heat softened everyone.

But it wasn’t just about business. These were places where men went to decompress in the most literal sense. Before there was language around mental health in the workplace, there was the steam room. Before therapy was de-stigmatized and there were a million meditation apps, there was a hot, humid room where no one made eye contact and everyone felt just a little more human walking out than they did walking in.

And it wasn’t just men. One of my favorite pre-pandemic rituals was the gym locker room. It didn’t matter where I lived, Maine, Sonoma, Philly, the locker room was sacred. You’d see women of every age and shape walk naked from the whirlpool to the mirror without so much as a towel drape. Especially the older women. They’d sit in the steam room naked, chatting like they were at the supermarket. Their bodies weren’t curated. They just were. Naked was normal. Naked was beautiful. Naked meant: why would I get yet another set of clothes dirty if I don’t have to? As someone who has been at war with my own body for nearly 40 years, these spaces felt so sacred to me.

Cut to today. My gym’s sauna and steam room are overrun by women in their dirty workout clothes. Socks. Shoes. Compression leggings soaking with sweat from a HIIT class they didn’t even rinse off from. They bring their iPhones, their AirPods, their Owala bottles, and treat the steam room like a cool-down lounge. It's gross, sure, but more than that, it’s spiritually bankrupt. Disgusting. Disrespectful.

They don’t want to sit. They want to optimize. This isn’t rest. This is hustle disguised as ritual. It’s productivity cosplay. The shvitz is no longer a sacred pause. It’s a checkmark on a stacked wellness checklist.

And yes, I know what some of you are thinking: Isn’t it a good thing that younger women now have access to these spaces?

Sure. But let’s not confuse access with understanding: I don't think this is empowerment. I don’t think this is reclamation. This is commodification and capitalism disguised as self-care. The ritual no longer matters, only the aesthetic does. It’s a “sweat session” as a lifestyle moment, fully clothed in Alo and accessorized with an Oura ring. We didn’t inherit the shvitz. If Halston is the shvitz, we inherited Halston III, the Halston licensed to JC Penny in 1983. A poly blend at best.

I’d just like to sit in the steam room in a towel and not feel like a space oddity. I’d like to sweat in peace. Naked. Without someone’s post-workout dripping onto said towel. I’d like fewer shoes. Fewer phones. Fewer compression tights releasing last night’s barre class into my sacred mist (do I sound like a Wellness influencer yet?)

You don’t need a mantra. You don’t need a tracker. You definitely don’t need a white woman on Instagram who lives in Tulum half the year telling you how to “hold space for your lymphs.”

Just wrap your tush in a little white towel and take a load off.

The shvitz will handle the rest.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF

* Anti-semitism, if you haven’t heard, is cool again. In September of last year, the FBI reported that anti-Jewish hate crimes had increased by 63% since … the year prior. Despite Jewish Americans making up just 2% of the U.S. population, reported single-bias anti-Jewish hate crimes made up 15% of all reported hate crimes in 2023 and 68% of all reported religion-based hate crimes. Much of this, of course, has to do with Israel. But I’d love to state again for the record, the acts of a country’s leader often has little to do with the country’s people. And even more-so, just because someone is Jewish doesn’t mean that they agree with Israeli leadership or even Israeli people who agree with their leadership. Let’s stop equating people to the most fundamental parts of their religions, or whatever. It’s really so lazy.

PS In writing this piece, I found a great old website called NewarkMemories.com which allowed me to travel back in time a bit - I suggest you do too.