The first thing I do every morning (after hopefully googling “Marjorie Taylor Greene” and “mysterious disappearance”) is read my Daily Dose of Inspiration from Nécessité, a wellness platform “manifested and created” by Erica Reid:
- Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart. —Roy T. Bennett
- When a new day begins, dare to smile gratefully. —Steve Maraboli
- Observation exists at the mysterious intersection of fate and attention. —Unknown
Usually, I have no idea who these people are (Steve Maraboli? O.K., he has a great jawline), and when the quotes are from “Unknown,” I have a sneaking suspicion they come from friends at Reid’s dinner parties. No matter. I’m a sucker for these little morning aperçus. I particularly love the tagline at the end of each e-mail: “You are a nécessité.” Yes, I am!
Erica Reid is the wife of music mogul LA Reid, who has brought us talents such as Rihanna, Justin Bieber, and Kanye West (though Reid is more recently in the news for a sexual-harassment-and-assault lawsuit from a former employee). He is estimated to be worth about $300 million, and their Bel Air home is on the market for $17.5 million, so it’s safe to say Erica is not doing this for the money.
Her platform is a collection of articles on wellness (“Understanding Alpha-Gal Syndrome, The Tick-Borne Meat Allergy”), charity suggestions, and self-care products, from anti-pollution face masks to Kansa wands. Right now, though, the store is paused while, Erica tells me, it’s undergoing a “rebirth” in Paris.
A vegan and clean-living diehard, Reid says she’s overcome years of health crises—both her own and her children’s—by eliminating all toxins from their diet and environment. “I zoned in and got more connected to my children, what I was feeding them, what they were inhaling, what they were digesting, what they were sleeping on.” She was, for example, a firm believer in cloth diapers “because I was like, the vagina’s too pure and innocent. I don’t want these chemicals disrupting down there already.” It may surprise you, or not, to know her now college-age kids are out and about in this world without inhalers or EpiPens. “All you can do is make them aware,” she says with a sigh. “They make their own choices.”
Reid is just one of a new generation of posh ladies who are re-inventing themselves as wellness influencers, perhaps jostling to be the next Gwyneth, or Marianne Williamson. She has been joined by Meghan Markle, whose advice runs to statements like “Don’t give up your activism” and “Inhale.” Markle announced in March the launch of her wellness-lifestyle site, American Riviera Orchard, which plans to sell—Edible oils? Inedible serums? Aphorisms? No one knows exactly, since so far it is just a logo on Instagram, but the actress and runaway royal did manage to ship jam to 50 of her closest pals.
Joining Markle in the wellness sweepstakes is her friend Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, the yoga instructor and, as of recently, Justin Trudeau’s ex-wife. She has written Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other, which was originally billed as a memoir. But there is barely a mention of her husband or being First Lady of Canada or having possibly the coolest mother-in-law in the world. Instead, it’s an exercise in rebranding, seeking “radical self-acceptance” with the help of an onslaught of doctors and wise men. Grégoire Trudeau is capable of saying, with a straight face, things like “I want us to take steps and risks together, on our parallel paths, so that we can find our light-filled purpose.” The book seems like a missed opportunity. What if you are navel-gazing but the navels around you are more interesting than yours?
What are the qualifications for becoming a society-lady wellness influencer? Well, money, certainly, and perhaps a little guilt about having it. (Wellness, after all, is a $1.8-trillion-a-year global business, according to McKinsey & Company; no matter how well off you are, who doesn’t want a piece of that?) Also, you need a lot of a resource arguably more precious than money: time. Some of us can save up and buy a $1,000 pair of shoes, a once-a-week housekeeper, maybe the occasional Botox spree. But how many of us have unlimited hours to devote to our mental and emotional health? Now that’s luxury.
For wellness-influencer success, it helps to have an already high Q rating, or at least be fame-adjacent, and some event in your life—say, divorce, or fleeing the royal family—is making you fret the imminent evaporation of that fame. And it goes without saying that you have to be very, very pretty, but in a specific way: glowy, warm, open to confidences; a look that says, I have wisdom from ancient cultures to share. I call it “resting enlightenment face.”
But perhaps the biggest commonality among this new generation of gurus: they’ve all had a dark night of the soul. Women don’t get into the wellness game if everything is just fine.
And it goes without saying that you have to be very, very pretty, but in a specific way: glowy, warm, open to confidences; a look that says, I have wisdom from ancient cultures to share.
Consider Vanessa Cornell. Cornell, now in her mid-40s, went to Harvard, worked at Goldman Sachs, and married Henry Cornell, a prominent financier. She is beautiful, brilliant, and brilliantly married, with five children at home. True, the home is a five-story town house on the Upper East Side, appointed with ancient Asian artifacts. True, there is a Picasso over the mantel. She seemed to have everything. Everything including a nervous breakdown.
Cornell had the problem that so many high-achieving, type-A women encounter when they leave the workforce. “You have this formula,” she says. “All your life, you put in the work, you do your best, and the outcome is, if not guaranteed, well, you can still probably get an A.” And then? “You have children,” she adds. Suddenly, your shiny new projects are … a crapshoot. “There was this deep, deep, deep loneliness because even during the hardest moment of my life, it didn’t even occur to me to tell anybody,” she continues. “And I think people were pretty shocked because on the outside my life looked pretty damn shiny and perfect. And so I think I opened the conversation about actually being honest about the fact that whatever your socio-economic status, whatever it looks like on the outside, being human is hard. Life is hard.”
In 2017 Cornell started Nushu, which is a Chinese word for “the secret language of woman.” Essentially it is a group of like-minded, and like-moneyed, Upper East Side women who find themselves quietly singing their own version of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” But this is not therapy, and Cornell is not a therapist. She sees herself as a facilitator, creating a “safe space” where people can talk about what’s going on in their lives “and nobody will try to fix it. We just listen, and let you be vulnerable.” There is journaling and facilitated workshops with names like “Releasing Mom Guilt” and surf retreats in Costa Rica. On Instagram, Cornell’s mission is “Mothering the mothers.”
“Wealth has an interesting impact,” says Amanda Fuhrman, a former lawyer and philanthropist whose husband, Glenn, an investment banker, has one of the foremost art collections in the country. She has been going to Nushu meetups in Cornell’s living room since their inception. “Perfectionism, and the need to control everything, is a recipe for unhappiness, and a lot of the women with money are controlling and perfectionistic. There is the idea that you can buy the perfect tutors, the perfect body. At the same time, there is this giant load of guilt.” It’s what Cornell herself calls the “gratitude trap, that keeps women of tremendous privilege paralyzed. The best thing you can do is go do something that lights you up.”
Admittedly, it’s hard to go all Sarah McLachlan about the problems of the 0.01 percent—but then, Cornell wouldn’t want you to. “There are people managing big lives, not working outside of the home, a little resentful and feeling trapped. But this is your choice. So own the choice or make a different choice.”
It’s a little ironic that the woman who could win the Gwyneth crown really doesn’t sell stuff (unless you count those seminars and posh retreats). Well, no, she does sell something, which even I can’t eye-roll about. Friendship. Community. And, O.K., maybe a little bit of her guru glow.
But I can’t help feeling that the ladies who lunch (and om) might find that the answer to the Peggy Lee song is: Yes. That is all there is. Embrace the mess, the awful times, as well as the joyous. Have your big life, and don’t try to micro-manage it, because you will fail. As the writer Nora Ephron (who had all of life’s answers, in my opinion) said: “Everything is copy.”
There. I’ve saved you tens of thousands of dollars in seminars and retreats. You’re welcome.
Judith Newman is a New York–based writer and the author of To Siri with Love
