The Longest Mile: July Edition
July was a build month. We put re-orders in for products that had been sold out, updated our sizing, started a summer sale on shirts, and we spent the rest of the month working on what comes next. Which means I spent most of July staring at a screen. By the third week my eyes felt like sandpaper every night. Not painful, just tired in a way that sleep was not fixing. So I started looking for answers, and I ended up somewhere I did not expect.
There is a video going around of people filling swim goggles with castor oil, putting them on, blinking for a few minutes, then rinsing it all out. The comments are full of people saying their vision got better and their eye floaters went away. The idea is not made up. It is a shortcut version of a very old eye treatment from India called Netra Tarpana. It comes from Ayurveda, which is the traditional medicine system used there for thousands of years. In the real version, a trained practitioner builds a small wall out of dough around your eye and fills it with warm ghee, which is clarified butter. You lie still for about twenty minutes and blink slowly. Clinics in India still offer it today.
The problem is what got left out of the shortcut. UCI Health published a piece saying castor oil does not belong near the eyes at all. Ophthalmology Times ran the same warning from several eye doctors. The issue is not really the oil. It is that castor oil off a store shelf is not sterile. It can carry dyes, fragrance, and preservatives that were never meant to touch the clear front of your eye. The proof behind it is thin too. One small study found it might help people with swollen, irritated eyelids. That is about all of it. That is a long way from the claims driving the videos.
What I keep thinking about is not whether it works. It is what happens next, because this always goes the same way. A remedy is old, cheap, and boring. Someone finds it again. It goes viral. Within a year there are a dozen brands selling an eye safe version in a fancy glass bottle for thirty four dollars, plus an applicator, plus a monthly subscription. The size of that machine is easy to miss. The Global Wellness Institute says the wellness industry hit a record 6.8 trillion dollars in 2024 and is on track for 9.8 trillion by 2029. That is almost four times bigger than the entire drug industry. None of that is wrong on its face, and I say that as someone who sells things. But the pattern is worth saying out loud. Almost nothing stays free once enough people want it.
Dry eyes are a good example. More than sixteen million American adults have been diagnosed with dry eye disease, and it is now showing up in people in their twenties in a way it did not a generation ago. How it happens is not complicated. You normally blink about fifteen times a minute. In front of a screen that drops to about five, so the thin layer of tears that coats your eye never spreads out right.
Neither side of the market is clean here. In 2023 the CDC and FDA linked two brands of eye drops, EzriCare and Delsam, to an outbreak of bacteria that antibiotics could not kill. Eighty one people got infected, fourteen lost vision, and four died. On the supplement side, a large study called DREAM gave over five hundred people fish oil every day for a year. It worked no better than a fake pill. That was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Old does not mean safe. Sold in a pharmacy does not mean proven.
What actually helped my eyes is boring, which is the whole point. I blink on purpose now. Every twenty minutes I look away from the screen and rest my eyes on something far away. At night I put a warm wet washcloth over my closed eyes, which is the same first step eye doctors use for clogged oil glands in the eyelids. I moved my monitor lower and stopped sitting under the air vent, which was drying me out more than the screen was. And I get outside more, because eight hours of air conditioning and a glowing rectangle is a strange place for a body to live. None of that is a business model. That is exactly why none of it trends.
The wellness industry is starting to look like the drug industry it was supposed to replace. There is a product for every problem. Take this pill. Chew this root. An ancient culture swore by it. Ninety dollars a month. The packaging is different but the game is the same. And the strange part is that most of what those old remedies were built around costs nothing. Eat real food. Get outside and get sun on your skin. Move every day. Wear something natural against your body. That covers more than most of what is being sold, which is exactly why nobody is selling it.
Health is rarely one big decision. It is usually a hundred small ones, and most of them are free.
Enjoyr your summer.
Thomas
Co-founder