The $95 Billion Search for Lent
Wellness culture reinvented 40-day resets, purification rituals, and structured self-denial—then discovered it had recreated the penitential season, minus the part that made it work.
Today marks the first day of Lent, which means roughly three-quarters of Americans won’t notice. Only 26% of U.S. adults observe the season anymore, a figure that has barely budged since 2016 but represents a dramatic collapse from the 1970s, when Lenten practice was culturally ubiquitous across much of the country. What’s curious isn’t just the decline—it’s what emerged to fill the space.
The same Americans who skip Ash Wednesday are increasingly likely to participate in “Dry January,” a month-long alcohol abstinence challenge that has exploded from 15% participation in 2023 to 33% in 2025. They’re purchasing products from a global “detox” industry projected to reach $95 billion by 2030, growing at over 6% annually. They’re joining the 43% of adults who’ve intentionally reduced screen time in the past six months, often describing it as a “digital detox.” They’re booking wellness retreats specifically advertised as technology-free zones, a trend significant enough that 27% of travelers now say they plan to reduce social media use during trips.
The pattern is striking: structured periods of self-denial, reset rituals, and purification practices haven’t disappeared. They’ve been rebranded, stripped of their theological context, and sold back as lifestyle optimization.
Consider the shape of what remains. Dry January mirrors Lent’s temporal structure almost exactly—a defined season of abstinence bracketed by normal life, typically lasting between 28 and 40 days. The detox industry’s language echoes pre-modern humoral medicine and Christian ideas of bodily purification, now repackaged as “removing toxins” and “cleansing.” Digital detox retreats function like secular monasteries, temporary withdrawals from the overstimulating world. Even the marketing sounds liturgical: “reset,” “renewal,” “starting fresh,” “cleansing your body and mind.”
What these secular substitutes preserve is Lent’s fundamental anthropological insight: humans periodically need structured breaks from their habitual consumption patterns. The 40-day framework wasn’t arbitrary. It emerged from centuries of observation about how long behavioral interruption requires to feel meaningful without becoming unsustainable. Modern “detox” programs seem to be rediscovering this timeline through trial and error—most Dry January participants complete the month successfully (72%), but those who fail typically quit in weeks one or two, suggesting the practice is calibrated correctly for habit disruption.
But notice what’s missing in translation. Traditional Lenten practice wasn’t primarily about self-improvement or optimization. Fasting from meat on Fridays or giving up luxuries for 40 days wasn’t marketed as a path to better sleep, clearer skin, or improved productivity. The discomfort was the point—a deliberate identification with suffering, an acknowledgment of mortality and dependence, a recognition that humans aren’t the center of their own story. The fast ended with a feast celebrating resurrection, not with Instagram posts celebrating your “glowing” complexion.
The modern substitutes, by contrast, are relentlessly instrumental. You detox for better health metrics. You do Dry January to sleep better, save money, or “prove you can.” You digital detox because screen time makes you less productive. The self remains at the center; the practice serves the self’s flourishing. There’s no corresponding feast, no narrative arc beyond personal optimization. January ends and you… resume normal life, perhaps with marginal improvements.
This shift reveals something about what we’ve preserved and what we’ve lost. The wellness industry has correctly identified that humans need periodic resets, structured self-denial, and temporary withdrawal from consumption. The $95 billion market exists because these are genuine human needs, not invented ones. The explosion of “Damp January” (reducing rather than eliminating alcohol) suggests people are hungry for frameworks that acknowledge they’re consuming too much of something, even if they’re not ready for total abstinence.
But frameworks for periodic self-denial without an animating purpose beyond the self tend to collapse into either consumerism (buying your way to detox) or neurotic self-monitoring. Which might explain why Lenten observance has remained stable at 26% despite massive cultural change—those who’ve retained the practice may have something the substitutes can’t quite replicate.
The most telling data point might be this: 48% of Americans say they plan to drink less alcohol in 2025 following their Dry January experiment, and 47% believe alcohol will be viewed more negatively over the next two decades, similar to cigarettes. These secular reset rituals are changing behavior. They work, up to a point. The question is whether frameworks for human flourishing designed without reference to anything beyond human flourishing can sustain themselves—or whether they’re borrowing capital from older structures while slowly discovering why those structures looked the way they did.