A man sitting in a sauna looks disgruntled as other patrons enjoy the spa beside him.

At first, I thought I was schvitzing in a sauna full of suckers. I was in communion with a diverse group of twenty “journeyers” at Guided All Around: A–Z Emotions, a seventy-five-minute guided class at Othership, the immersive sauna and cold-plunge experience set in the basement of a Yorkville condo. Othership offers self-guided and instructor-led classes focused on emotional wellness, where busy yuppies like me can socialize and destress. (I had no issues whatsoever making this class on a Tuesday at 5:30 p.m.) For nearly an hour, journeyers enthusiastically followed the choreographed exercises for emotional regulation—breathwork, screaming, self-inquiry. I did so with half-hearted obedience. My eyes were open (and rolling) when they were meant to be closed, and I was fidgety when I should’ve been still. Was the modern bathhouse where I’d find community?

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The idea for Othership was born in the summer of 2019, when Robbie Bent and his now wife, Emily, relocated to Toronto after nearly two years bouncing between hacker houses from San Francisco to Berlin for Bent’s tech job. While abroad, Bent and his friends would often visit modern bathhouses—alcohol-free social spaces. Upon moving home, Bent, a former addict, was intent on building a healthy, sober community. So the couple installed an ice bath in their backyard and formed a WhatsApp group so their friends could easily coordinate cold plunges—ice-bath immersions thought to improve one’s mood and cognitive alertness.

Soon the group grew to 300 members, and then to 1,000. “It was free,” Bent says, “so there would be, like, fifteen people back there midday, having coffee and using the ice bath.” Come winter, Bent built a sauna in his garage and began accepting pay-what-you-can donations for use. He also started experimenting with guided group classes in the hot and cold environments rooted in two pillars of personal growth: fostering intimacy and encouraging vulnerability. This, he says, “has never been done before on planet Earth.”

In pursuit of self-improvement, Bent has done it all: Hoffman, Landmark, psychedelics, meditation. The people crying in his garage, however, had not. Bent and Emily led the first class on Valentine’s Day for three couples. After a cold plunge, the couples were instructed to hug each other and hold eye contact before proceeding to the sauna for a guided massage. They then asked each couple to share with the group a story from their first date. When one recounted a tender memory, others followed; the act of sharing was infectious and seemed to uncork a powerful desire for human connection.

Bent saw this kind of thing again and again. “People are crying,” Bent recalls. “People are like, ‘Oh, this changed my life. This helped me stay sober. I met five new friends.’” These emotional responses became a pattern, and Bent’s entrepreneurial instincts kicked in. Here was proof of concept for an innovative venture: a modern bathhouse for agnostic city dwellers where social connection and emotional health are entwined. “Can we get more people at scale who never had access to therapy or yoga or meditation—maybe their brain doesn’t work that way—to explore this stuff?” he pondered. “And then to do it in a group?”

In early 2022, Bent, Emily, and three partners pooled $2 million to open Othership in downtown Toronto, just a cleansing breath away from tech HQs, ad agencies, condos, nightclubs, Ace Hotel, and Dog World, a luxury pet resort—temples of play and productivity. With a fifty-person performance sauna, ice baths, and a communal space, Othership was a state-of-the-art Zen den. Soaring demand and investor money allowed for a second space in tony Yorkville. Another just opened in midtown Manhattan, and a fourth is planned for Williamsburg. As CEO, Bent envisions an Othership in every city across North America.

Urban bathhouses are a booming market in a global wellness industry reportedly valued at $5.6 trillion (US). But the sauna is getting crowded. Last December, the Finnish-inspired sauna and ice-bath studio Alter opened in Toronto’s west end. Around the same time, Bathhouse—an Equinox-esque space in Williamsburg with Bitcoin-heated pools—opened a second outpost in midtown Manhattan’s Flatiron, a couple blocks north of Othership, and is expanding to Chicago. Knot Springs is a “wellness social club” in Portland where haute hippies can cold-plunge with skyline views.

The contemporary iteration of the bathhouse is the Ur-example of the social wellness trend—group activities for physical or emotional optimization that are meant to nurture community. Competitors like Alter also offer guided classes with breathwork and meditation without Othership’s theatrics or emotional angle. Others, like Bathhouse and Remedy Place, offer a wider range of wellness facilities and spa services like cryotherapy and massages in a private club environment for elite communal healing. Then, from the duo behind SoulCycle, there’s Peoplehood, which, according to its website, organizes hour-long group conversations (known as Gathers) led by “storytellers, super connectors, DJ’s and empaths [sic].”

The approaches may differ but all share a message: that collective self-care experiences—whether it’s a sauna, a cold plunge, or mock group therapy—can nurture deep bonds and unlock happiness. No phones, no booze, just us. In an atomized world, can social wellness provide real community? Or is that the specious logic powering a lucrative market commodifying our emotions?

Across cultures, communal bathhouses have served as democratic hubs for relaxation, socializing, and, more recently, queer safety. Turkish hammams and Russian banyas have long been sacred community spaces. In Finland, 90 percent of residents commune weekly to destress and reconnect at a public sauna, where “everyone is equal and stripped of status,” writes Miranda Bryant, the Guardian’s Nordic correspondent.

Traditional and infrared saunas are a common amenity at gyms and spas. And in the past few years, wellness influencers like alleged abuser Wim Hof, a.k.a. the Iceman, the womanizing pop neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, and Silicon Valley biohackers and their acolytes made the ice bath, a popular practice in sports therapy to speed up muscle recovery, a mainstream trend for longevity and mental well-being. The ritual dates back to the ancient Greeks, who took cold-water baths to treat mental health conditions. (More recently, at an asylum in nineteenth-century Ireland, it was used as punishment for unruly patients and was banned in 1873 after a man died.) While the scientific evidence for the long-term benefits, like increased metabolism, is slightly dubious, experts say that, over time, regular cold plunges can improve your mood. Talk to any diehard and they’ll swear it’s like an emotional baptism.

The modern bathhouse combines the communal sauna and ice bath under one roof for the stated purpose of fostering social connection. Catherine Sabiston, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies exercise and health psychology and is Canada research chair in physical activity and mental health, argues that any opportunity for communal engagement in these ancient health practices ultimately serves a social good. But while community may be “possible” in social wellness environments, “it’s not inherent,” Sabiston says. “You can’t build it with tech. You can’t build that with bricks and mortar. It comes from a natural sense of the purpose, and the purpose is lost in some of these branded environments.”

They’re also expensive. A single drop-in costs $55 before tax; Alter charges $45. A standard membership at the crypto-powered Bathhouse costs $235.13 (US) a month; the monthly membership fee at Knot Springs runs between $200 and $400 (US). Member clubs in New York, Los Angeles, and London command up to $10,000 (US) in annual membership fees, targeting a preposterously moneyed and aspiringly immortal echelon.

The third season of Industry cleverly satirizes how wellness entrepreneurs spot juicy market opportunities, when the aristocratic CEO of a green energy start-up—who is under government investigation after his failed IPO cost British taxpayers millions in a bailout—hauls his former whipping boy to the woods for a surprise Ayahuasca trip. A lucid moment interrupts the CEO’s drug-fuelled, hallucinatory daze. Pausing between fits of hysterical laughter, he grabs his subordinate’s dopey face and says: “We have to find a way to monetize this.”

At Guided A–Z, our instructor, Tanya Curley, explains that the class will explore four emotions: anger, bravery, compassion, and despair. Tanya is fit and ageless, with cropped grey hair and a hypnotically soothing demeanour. She is the lead guide at Othership and a long-time life coach who later tells us that she has been sober for over ten years. The application process for certain roles, including guides, requires video responses to specific prompts. For example, the job description for Toronto front desk steward asks applicants to respond to “How have you been of service to others in your life recently?” One prospective guide was asked how she’d welcome someone into her home and to perform a special talent. The job of a guide demands an actor’s charisma and a guru’s persuasiveness.

We start in the sauna. First, anger: red lights, tense music (from a Spotify playlist). We’re instructed to conjure someone or something that has affected us, directing our rage to bubble up through our bodies before expelling it with a collective scream, like a soda geyser. Then we head to the cold plunge for bravery. Nearly everyone completes the full two-minute plunge while Curley’s motivational messages echo through the chilly sanctum. I curl up on the stone lip of the tub and literally dip a toe in. Next, numb and alive, we re-enter the sauna for compassion. Curley encourages journeyers to share what came up for them in the class or what they’re grateful for. Finally, the grand finale, despair: total darkness, heavy breathing. Curley nudges us toward emotional free fall in service of processing our feelings.

A brawny fellow sitting on the sauna’s third level breaks our few seconds of tentative silence. He’s chuffed to have completed the full two-minute cold plunge today because the water was extra cold (our instructor confirms that it was between zero and two degrees, which is colder than usual.) An older man (second level) says the class helped him dislodge anger that he subconsciously represses. A young woman (third level) then shares how the class has inspired her to liaise between estranged family members. Finally, a middle-aged mother sobs. Othership, she says, has granted her a moment of peace and clarity in a period of chaos.

I had been shooting blanks emotionally for nearly an hour when a clear feeling hijacked me: I envied how easily everyone dropped into the rhythm of the class, especially the journeyers who were so freely vulnerable. I became acutely self-conscious. Was I so cynical, so stuck in my head, that I couldn’t connect? Staring unblinkingly at the weeping woman, I felt pangs of empathy—or was it sympathy? Sharply aware that I was alone in a crowd, my eyes warned of tears. But it was just sweat stinging my corneas.

Wellness pedals vibes, not science. That doesn’t make a business harmful, just hokey. But as mental health care migrates from the domain of practitioners to entrepreneurs, our emotions become a commodity. The industry doesn’t explicitly claim to treat psychological conditions, but businesses slyly position themselves as alternatives to traditional therapy.

“Building community, I think, is a great thing, but not when you’re purporting to address mental health concerns without any qualifications,” says Jonathan N. Stea, a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor at the University of Calgary who recently published the book Mind the Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry. Stea points out that there are free peer-support services for people who struggle with addiction, including the 12-Step Program and Smart Recovery. But, he warns, “that’s also not therapy, and it’s not treatment.”

Social wellness is one tentacle of a burgeoning loneliness economy comprised of a morass of frictionless services promising solutions to complex problems. Peoplehood and Othership are the most visible brands making “doing the work” fun and efficient, a mental tune-up for the overworked yuppie. In a New York Times profile, co-founder Julie Rice said that Peoplehood’s Gathers aren’t intended to sub in for a psychologist. “It feels therapeutic, but it’s not therapy,” she told the reporter. “It’s vitamins, not medicine.” On its website, Peoplehood includes a link to mental health resources and notes that the company does not provide people with therapy or counselling services but instead helps “improve their relational health.” The website Fitt Insider, which tracks fitness and wellness industry news, called Peoplehood “spirituality-as-a-service.” In this new market, you can add community to cart and upgrade your emotional state.

Bent is also a savvy brand builder who sincerely believes that Othership is a conduit for vital human connection. “You see somebody say, like, Oh my God, I’m going through this really hard breakup, and it’s just made me question my confidence. And then everybody in the room has went through a breakup,” Bent says, giving a hypothetical. “There’s not many places in life where you see people being human, especially in a group.” It sounds like bullshit, but isn’t he right? If post-pandemic loneliness is a public health concern, isn’t being human in a group a solution?

I’d visited Othership once before my class, for a media preview of the new Yorkville location with a group of journalists. We were there for a “social”—one of Othership’s flagship events—that’s marketed as a sober night out; club music pulses, but vodka sodas are swapped for cups of mint tea. For two hours, the group mixed and mingled in the sauna and coached each other through the cold plunge. The experience struck me as a fun, novel way to socialize without the promise of a hangover. I left content and convinced.

Months later, though, I left my class, withdrawn and a little disillusioned. Not with Othership’s mission or proposition. But by the grim notion that self-improvement is not only a cultural imperative but a spectator sport, like professional wrestling. Othership calls its cult-y theatrics “wellness entertainment,” and journeyers are both audience and participant. Consciously or not, everyone is performing.

Whether the revelations or responses you experience at Othership are “authentic” or not is irrelevant; if you feel it, it’s real. But in the business of emotional wellness, unwellness is converted into data and dollars. Loneliness is lucrative, and trauma is our lingua franca. To share is to heal, and healing is virtuous. But emotionally, we are a culture of showers, not growers. The collective catharsis is contrived, an orchestral climax led by a seasoned conductor. In a for-profit soul-baring session, the sense of intimacy generated is inherently superficial. Self-improvement is still a solitary pursuit, no matter who’s watching. Aren’t we all on our own journeys?

I left Othership the same as I entered: sweaty, alone, with my head in my phone. A few days later, I booked my first therapy appointment in over a year.

Josh Greenblatt

Josh Greenblatt is a freelance journalist based in Toronto covering cultural and consumer trends for outlets such as Wired, GQ, and The Walrus.

Franco Égalité is an illustrator and artist based in Montreal.

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Schvitzing at the Sauna like a Sucker