When your whole life is a health project

9 October 2025

Health and medicine, Education and society, Faculty of Arts and Education

There has been a significant cultural shift in recent years that has seen young people in Aotearoa New Zealand come to view health as an all-encompassing mantra that applies to every aspect of their lives.

In her latest book, social and medical anthropologist Professor Susanna Trnka from the University of Auckland identifies this trend as 'healthization'.

Drawing on ethnographic interviews with over 200 New Zealanders aged 14 to 24, Healthization: Turning Life into Health (University of Pennsylvania Press, September 2025) examines how young people are viewing health as a moral and social responsibility, rather than simply a case of not getting sick.

"The young people's stories in this book offer a window on the different ways health is experienced in the first part of the 21st century," says Trnka. "For many of them, health isn't about being a patient in the medical system, it's a moral approach to how one lives one's life."

The book looks at how health for them encompasses emotional regulation, trusted friendships, mindfulness, fitness routines, nutritional tracking, mental health openness, and even aesthetic choices, like what kind of lipstick to wear.

"Health has also become a new project of self-fashioning through which young people distinguish themselves from their parents, teachers, friends and peers, and the public at large," says Trnka.

She says this expanded view has been adopted with an audience in mind (often on social media) and reflects a radically holistic approach to wellness that is substantially different from say the 1980s, when she herself was growing up.

"Being healthy for these young people requires an investment of extensive work, resources and time, but not necessarily money."

For example, she says, one of the young men she spoke to is a medical student who works at KFC and hates his job but uses running as a mental training routine to help his studies.

"He runs to be "disciplined" and sees running as the ticket to getting him through med school; he uses a free app and has doubled the routines to make it tougher on himself."

The book situates this phenomenon within broader political and economic contexts, including the former Labour government's 'Wellbeing Budget', which redefined success by prioritising people's health, life satisfaction, and environmental sustainability over economic growth, as well as the neoliberal emphasis on self-responsibility, and the commodification of wellness, especially on social media.

And it's also very much a product of the young, Covid generation, says Trnka.

"Covid has made young people much more aware of social and emotional health. This is not to say they weren't aware of it before the lockdowns; our interviews before those show they certainly did use this language and have this focus, but they really emphasised it during and immediately after the Covid years."

There has been a significant cultural shift in recent years that has seen young people in Aotearoa New Zealand come to view health as an all-encompassing mantra that applies to every aspect of their lives.

Trnka says family background played an important role, both in the case of coming from a family that was very health conscious, and one that wasn't.

"Our interviewees whose families were keen on exercise, nutrition or mental health talked about that as having an impact on their own behaviour. However equally, those whose family members were not keen on these activities also mentioned that as driving factor; in that they don't want to have heart issues at 45 like their dad, or they don't want to ignore their mental health like their parents did."

The concept of healthization links body and society, individual agency and state policy, digital technologies and emotional ethics, and young people are at the forefront of this trend, says Trnka.

"They're adopting digital health technologies, promoting mental wellness online and engaging in self-care as both a personal and collective duty, which very much reflects the times they're living in."

Combining the fields of medical anthropology, digital culture studies and youth sociology in a fresh way, Healthization is available in hardcover and eBook formats.

Susanna Trnka is the author of 11 books and currently the Editor-in-Chief of American Ethnologist.

Media contact

Julianne Evans | Media adviser M: 027 562 5868 E: [email protected]

Related links