julianne hough

Julianne Hough, the Utah-born dancer who once glided across American living rooms in sequined anonymity, has now pirouetted onto a far larger stage: the planet’s collective nervous breakdown. From the Dolby Theatre to Davos, from TikTok’s algorithmic abyss to a sweat lodge in the Swiss Alps, Hough’s recent career pivot—part corporate-wellness messiah, part high-end grief concierge—has become a Rorschach test for what the world is willing to pay to feel slightly less doomed.

Let’s zoom out. While COP28 delegates argued over commas in a 21-page confession of planetary remorse, Hough was in the Alps, clad in cashmere athleisure, leading a group of C-suite escapees through “energetic cord-cutting” rituals at something called the Kinrgy Dome. The tab? $6,000 per soul, not including airfare or existential baggage. That’s roughly the annual income of a Bangladeshi garment worker stitching the very leggings being lunged in. The irony is so thick you could spread it on gluten-free toast.

Her new venture, Kinrgy—a portmanteau that sounds like a cryptocurrency you’d regret buying—has already franchised pop-ups in London’s Soho, Dubai’s Jumeirah, and a repurposed bomb shelter in Tel Aviv (because nothing says spiritual rebirth like reinforced concrete). Each locale offers the same promise: transmute your trauma into “expansive movement,” preferably while being filmed for Reels. The content, of course, is geotagged, hashtagged, and monetized in real time, proving that even catharsis has a conversion funnel.

Globally, the appetite is bottomless. In Seoul, overworked tech employees swap their nightly soju for guided “emotional release” sessions where they scream into imported Himalayan salt lamps. In Lagos, where the national grid flickers like a dying disco ball, pop-up Kinrgy classes run on diesel generators—each downward dog a tiny emissions scandal. Meanwhile, European bureaucrats, exhausted from sanctioning one another, schedule lunchtime “somatic sovereignty” workshops in the same Brussels basements once used to plan monetary union. Progress, apparently, is just grief with better branding.

What makes Hough fascinating isn’t the choreography; it’s the geopolitical choreography around her. As mental-health infrastructure collapses under post-pandemic debt, governments outsource emotional regulation to the private sector. The result is a privatized patchwork of healing: if you’re wealthy, you jet to a glacier for tearful sun salutations; if you’re not, there’s always the free meditation app sponsored by a payday-loan company. Hough sits at the apex of this pyramid, a blonde apex smiling beatifically while Rome, Caracas, and Lahore smolder gently in the background.

The darker punchline? It works. Participants leave the dome claiming measurable drops in cortisol and measurable spikes in LinkedIn engagement. Corporations book her for morale events the same way they once booked cover bands: cheaper than raises, more photogenic than therapy. And so the global worker—whether coding in Chennai or cold-calling in Cologne—learns to metabolize systemic despair via interpretive dance. Marx spins in his grave so fast you could strap a dynamo to him and power Kinrgy’s LED crystals.

Still, credit where due: Hough has weaponized optimism with entrepreneurial zeal. In an age when national narratives splinter into paranoid subreddits, she offers a unifying creed: shake your hips, save your soul, tag three friends. It’s not the Paris Agreement, but it’s infinitely more actionable at 2 a.m. when the doom-scroll hits.

As the northern hemisphere tilts into another summer of biblical weather, one can imagine future archaeologists unearthing a Kinrky wristband—rose quartz embedded in biodegradable silicone—alongside melted traffic lights and a charred Netflix password. They’ll wonder what ritual required such adornment. The answer, of course, is the oldest ritual of all: paying someone beautiful to tell us the end isn’t nigh, even as the credits roll.