Opinion: Let’s start the New Year with an Alaskan-style wellness movement

Published 10:30 pm Tuesday, January 6, 2026

The yin and yang of much of the modern wellness movement is: You’re a victim of everything bad in your life, and you can be empowered by acquiring self-esteem.

The yin means you’re not responsible. The yang elevates attitude over achievement. This movement is a commercialized mega-industry. Wellness is attained by buying the book, workshop, seminar, or therapy service of a particular guru.

Time for an odyssey

In the words of Tennyson’s Ulysses, calling his comrades to one last heroic adventure, “Come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

Alaskans are well-suited to lead the movement I envision. It doesn’t have any yin and yang, more like meat and potatoes.

Sweat everything

Instead of “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff—It’s All Small Stuff” our movement’s mantra will be “Sweat Everything — It’s All Important.” Henry David Thoreau told us to look for truth and meaning in the details of nature. What better place to do that than Alaska? Hank understood that if you stop marveling at the small stuff, you might as well get a lobotomy. You might be happy, but that’s way overrated.

Embrace complexity and nuance

The commercialized wellness movement makes a brouhaha about simplifying your life — in books that have one sophomoric tip and a feng shui diamond or curlicue in the middle of a whole page surrounded by barren space begging for some passion and paradox.

Everyone has a right to sell pabulum. But if you’re touting how to rid your life of clutter and waste, only use the amount of paper needed. Do that and our lives will be simplified when the book that costs twenty bucks is reduced to a 10-page pamphlet. Fewer trees consumed, less space taken on bookshelves and in landfills.

Instead of Simplify Your Life our movement will proclaim — Embrace Complexity and Nuance. Complexity and nuance aren’t happy pills, but they can enrich communication and deepen understanding. That can improve problem solving versus problem ignoring.

What’s the hoopla over happiness?

Now as I read it — and it doesn’t take long — simplifying your life and not sweating the small stuff are supposed to bring happiness. What is all the hoopla over happiness? What happened to a meaningful life? One way to a meaningful life is a sense of duty.

Do your duty, serve others

What better place than Alaska—where nature often demands interdependency—to advance a wellness movement based on duty and service?

Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore got it: “I slept and dreamt that life was Joy / I woke and saw that life was Duty / I acted, and behold, Duty was Joy.”

Instead of simplified, visualized happiness and self-esteem, our Alaskan movement will seize the joy of duty. Just think of the stir we’ll cause basing a self-help movement on personal accountability and responsibility to others.

We can do it

Anthropologist Margaret Meade said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Years ago, I had to dead stick land our bush plane when the engine stopped. My passenger (our beloved dog) and I were unhurt. The plane was unflyable. My husband contacted a fellow Alaskan, Lloyd Grover, for help. Lloyd had an Experimental Piper PA-12 on floats that could land on a nearby small lake, and take off again with me, the dog, and our gear. We tried to pay Lloyd when he delivered us safely. But Lloyd wouldn’t consider it, instead saying, “This is Alaska. We do these things for each other.”

This is Alaska. What better place to start a wellness movement that embraces the wondrous details of nature, the complexity and nuance of life, and the joy of serving others?

Val Van Brocklin has worn several professional hats—working with adults with disabilities, as a state and federal prosecutor in Alaska, as an international trainer and author of hundreds of published articles. She now occupies herself with more flying, fishing, hunting, traveling, and writing what she wants. She lives in Anchorage.