Am I partial to a morning walk before work? Absolutely. Drinking enough water and eating a balanced diet genuinely does make me feel better. Reformer Pilates does too, and there are few things more satisfying than waking up after eight glorious, uninterrupted hours to a sleep score above 85.

Yes, these are all objectively good things. And yet, somewhere around turning 30, I started to wonder whether we’d become a little too good at being good. Our lives are so carefully optimised – the workouts, the meals, the steps, the sleep – that there seems to be increasingly little room left for the messier parts of living. By which I mean, of course, the fun parts.

Our days are packed with work, gym classes, meal prep, skincare, step counts and sleep goals – plus, for the especially committed, perhaps a three-month marathon training plan or 75 Hard thrown into the mix. There is always another habit to build, another metric to improve, another version of ourselves to work towards.

We seem almost insatiable in our pursuit of feeling “well”. And somewhere in the middle of all that self-improvement, the spontaneous Wednesday afternoon drink at the pub has vanished. So has the dinner that turns into another drink, that somehow ends with a bottle of rosé at midnight. The kind of night I fiercely loved in my mid-20s. One, I was happy to pay for with a headache at my desk at the next morning.

Friendship is starting to feel a little like a dentist appointment – not because it’s particularly painful, but because you have to book it weeks in advance and then send an obligatory reminder text to see if “youre still on” for Saturday night.

A friend recently said,  “I feel like we’ve optimised wellness so hard that we’ve forgotten the actual life part. Like, since when do we need protecting from a random Wednesday night?”

Exactly.

I don’t think there is anything more depressing than “living for the weekend”, but I can see how we got here. Monday to Friday for most of my friends has become a series of small obligations they’ve made to themselves. Work until five. Gym at six. Dinner at seven. Shower. Skincare. In bed by 9.30 so your Oura Ring doesn’t greet you in the morning with complete and utter disappointment.

Somewhere in that schedule, spontaneity can no longer exist.

There is no obvious place for the wine suggested at 4.47 pm, or the dinner that was only meant to last an hour, or the friend who calls because something terrible has happened and they don’t want to be alone. These things don’t fit neatly between reformer Pilates and an early night. They arrive without warning, which is perhaps what makes them feel like life in the first place.

I’m not suggesting we throw out every good habit we’ve worked so hard to build, or start treating Tuesday night as an invitation to drink until midnight. I just wonder if, in our determination to become the healthiest possible versions of ourselves, we’ve made health strangely narrow. We count the steps, the protein, the hours slept. We rarely count the night spent laughing with someone we love.

There is also a financial layer to this.

Wellness has become expensive. Between boutique gym memberships, Pilates classes, creatine, supplements, and whatever wearable tracking device is currently telling us we’re stressed, being healthy can start to feel less like looking after yourself and more about throwing hundreds of dollars a week towards fix – often not knowing what we’re even trying to fix in the first place.

As one person told me, when you’re spending $80 to $150 a week on group fitness, it makes sense that you feel accountable to actually show up.

“The spontaneous friend hang turns into a night out, turns into new friends wanting more time, and the accountability to keep up one’s own commitments to expenses and decisions overrides flimsy spontaneous friend hangs,” they said.

And honestly, I get it. If you’ve paid $35 for a reformer class, cancelling it to eat carbonara and drink copious amounts of shiraz with a friend can feel financially irresponsible.

But this is where wellness starts to feel slightly warped. We’re taught to see the class as an investment in ourselves, while friendship becomes the thing that can be pushed to next weekend. The irony, of course, is that missing one workout will make almost no difference at all (sorry!). Sometimes the healthier choice is the one that looks less disciplined.

I think the antidote to all of this is bringing back wellness in a way that is actually enjoyable. Not pilates enjoyable, but more unstructured and sociable. Yes, doing squats is important, but so is using your body to actually live.

Help your friend pick up the 50kg dresser they found on on Marketplace. Walk to dinner instead of driving. Carry someone’s boxes when they move house. Go for a swim in the ocean. Dance badly in someone’s living room to Addison Rae. Spend the morning wandering around the farmers markets.

You probably won’t hit your Activity Goal, sure. But I promise you, moving boxes up three flights of stairs will have you sweating and swimming in the ocean with your best friend will make you feel just as many endorphins as a run.

More importantly, you are doing something with another person, most likely someone you love. You are building the kind of community that cannot be replicated by attending the gym with thirty other strangers with noise-cancelling headphones in.

Wellness should make your life bigger.

Of course, there is another side to this. For some people, routine is what makes friendship possible.

One busy friend who travels regularly for work told me that with limited time to exercise, fitness sometimes has to take priority over spontaneous plans. But when close friends organise something in advance, they can build around it.

And I think that distinction matters.

The problem is not having a routine. It is when the routine becomes so sacred, there is no space for spontaneity.

Maybe the goal is not to become less healthy, but to change our definition of health.

Keep the Pilates class. Eat the protein, sure. Go to bed early when you need the rest. But maybe leave the occasional Tuesday open for actual fun. Wake up on a weekday morning and text a few friends. See who’s free for an afternoon drink, or maybe dinner. Or maybe it’s even simpler than that: skip the gym once in a while, open a bottle of wine and watch a crime doco on the couch with a friend you haven’t seen in a while.

The truth is, the healthiest version of you should still be someone your friends actually get to see, with a sprinkle of spontaneity thrown into it every once in a while.

And if your wellness routine is making your world smaller, lonelier and less spontaneous, perhaps it’s worth asking whether it’s still doing what wellness was meant to do in the first place: make you feel better.