This is what unsettles me most about the race for perfection at work in the interlocking worlds of wellness and parenting: the pervasive structural unwellness from which the hyperwell and insistently perfect are so clearly fleeing. The unwellness that is all around. At bottom, I suspect that much of the mirroring and doubling we are seeing comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see, to really look at—in our midst, in our past, and in the tumultuous future racing toward us. There are many different ways to try to outrun our shadows. Succumbing to conspiracy worlds is only one of them. And it was toward a confrontation with those shadows that this mapping was taking me, inexorably, next.

DEFINE: Frames the author's core thesis: the hyperwell and perfectionist behaviors are flight responses to surrounding structural unwellness, not genuine achievement. SEED: Could yield an essay tracing wellness culture and intensive parenting as parallel escapes from systemic discomfort, ending in a confrontation with what we refuse to see.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 733