Writing at TakiMag, Dalrymple reflects on how the modern obsession with “well-being” often masks normal human dissatisfaction, arguing that wellness as a cultural ideal is detached from genuine health and grounded more in self-absorption than in real flourishing:

The search for well-being is essentially egotistical, as well as futile. It is like the search for happiness when directly aimed at. If someone says that his ambition is to be happy, you know that he is a lost soul, just as someone who claims to lack self-esteem is a lost soul. Happiness and its pale, vapid quasi-physiological imitator, well-being, are not to be achieved, or arrived at by prescription, but are the consequence or by-product of an effortful life, appreciated only in retrospect.

Read the full essay here.