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I get the weirdest ads on my Kindle.  Most of the time whenever I first wake up my e-reader, I’ll see an advertisement for some kids’ picture book that I’ve never heard of, and that bears no resemblance to anything in my Amazon search history.

The ad pictured above, however, deviates from my regular kiddie lit diet.  On the surface, Mindful Living appears to be a perfectly normal title that one would imagine to find in any bookstore’s self help/wellness section.

Business is good for the Wellness-Industrial Complex here in the late modern West.  We probably spend more resources––time, money, energy, travel––on these things than any other culture in the history of the world.

To my mind, modern conceptions of wellness may overlap with what the apostle Paul identifies as the fruit of the Holy Spirit (i.e., love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control), but it’s not the same thing.  I suspect that there’s a lot more self-focus in contemporary wellness than what Jesus would be comfortable commending.  Wholeness in the current sense and holiness in the biblical sense aren’t coextensive categories.

Even so, I’m not at war with wellness culture, albeit a bit wary.  What intrigues me about this Kindle ad isn’t that it’s hawking a mindfulness book but that it’s not a real book written by a real person!  At least for a bit longer, one of the tells for AI-generated images is typos, and check out the subtitle there to Mindful Living: “techniques for reducing stress and eating and increeasing happinesss [sic].”  And if you zoom in on the fine print at the top of the book’s cover, it’s all gibberish.  

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Exhibit A for the craziness of life in 2024: a book on human wellness written by a machine!  I didn’t buy it.

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