Help Beyond Self-Care

Rewind to 2011 and you’ll find Tom Haverford and Donna Meagle celebrating their favorite day of the year on the beloved TV show Parks and Recreation. “It’s Treat Yourself 2011” they sing to each other before going to the mall and impulse buying all the clothes, fragrances, and “fine leather goods” that strike their fancy. Five years after Tom and Donna “treat themselves,” right around the 2016 presidential election, the topic of self-care began to skyrocket as a Google search topic. What was once a TV gag was turning into a bona fide cultural phenomenon. A decade or so later, self-care is now the default advice given to those who are struggling with life’s hardships, whether that comes in the form of self-help gurus on Instagram, therapist’s couches, or corporate HR departments.

According to Vox writer Allie Volpe, the idea of self-care started as a personal health concept in the 1950s — public health officials urged people to take ownership of their health through diet, exercise, and regular checkups. In the 1960s, self-care became politicized by the Black Panther movement, which told its adherents that revolutionaries needed to be in peak physical condition to fight in their race and class conflict. (Practically, this looked like free school-lunch programs and free health clinics in mostly black neighborhoods.) The fitness revolutions of the ’80s and ’90s popularized exercise, but the seeds of modern self-care culture truly took root after the Great Recession in 2008. It was then that Gwyneth Paltrow started her famous wellness website Goop and athleisure clothing like Lululemon came into style. Self-care, according to Volpe, was now an act of conspicuous consumption, a way of signaling wealth in a time of economic turmoil. Modern day self-care fulfills a similar purpose: the stressors of the world are best handled by the consumption of consumer goods and services, often shared on social media in exchange for likes and publicity.

Despite the popularity of self-care, however, it’s not clear that the trend is actually working. Like the self-help book industry, if people were achieving the kind of serenity they were searching for with self-care, then there wouldn’t be such an expansion of the industry and variety of new consumables to try. Why is it that the products which promise to de-stress us and give us zen aren’t fulfilling that goal?

First, most of these self-care practices require the regular consumption of consumer goods. Between face scrubs, smartphone apps, salt lamps, and healthy diet substitutions, self-care is expensive. The reason most people don’t go out and impulse buy the things that make them happy is not, like Tom and Donna, because they work too hard to focus on themselves, but because they simply can’t afford them.

Second, most of these self-care practices are individualistic in their scope. The things that sociologists say will actually help us cope with life’s hardest demands are not things, but deep meaningful relationships with other people. When people look for relief in massages, a new pair of fuzzy socks, or adult coloring books, what they really need is time with a friend, a spouse, or a family member. Self-care simply cannot replace those key life relationships that sustain, support, and grow us in life’s difficulties.

Third, the whole concept of self-care puts the onus of stress management on the individual when the problem is living in a stressful world. In 2021, Amazon was rightly mocked for offering its warehouse employees “AmaZen” wellness booths, where employees could go to “recharge their internal batteries” by watching mindfulness and meditation videos. This from a company accused of withholding bathroom breaks from employees, demanding regular ten-hour shifts, paying delivery drivers less than minimum wage, and tracking employee movements with efficiency monitoring cameras. Self-care can be a sort of social gaslighting, where we blame humans for struggling in the midst of inhuman conditions. Sometimes, the problem isn’t our inability to measure up to life’s demands: often, it’s the demands of society that should be changed.

Intuitively, we all know that most of the products sold as self-care remedies are offering an illusion, whether we buy into them or not. Many of life’s problems are simply too big to be ameliorated with cash. No amount of moisturizer or skin cream can make up for the fact that chemotherapy will make a patient’s hair fall out. No number of bubble baths will assuage the sadness that comes with the death of a family member. Nothing sold on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website will make an awful job less awful. Self-care solutions may take the edge off small problems, but most of the time, our problems aren’t small.

That’s also not to say we don’t hope that these easy solutions work either. I have my own list of self-care products that I’ve tried to use to cope with life’s hardships. Fidget spinners, probiotic sodas, smartphone apps that turn your phone into a “dumb” phone, fancy shaving creams and shaving packages, house plants, gardening, man Spanx, air diffusers, expensive hipster haircuts that come with a beer, a straight razor shave, and a hot towel … they’re nice, but they’re not solving any problems, and frankly, they’re often more distracting than helpful. They’re more likely to engender resentment than actual mental health when they prove to be ineffective.

As long as we embrace self-care as the primary way of dealing with life’s hardships, we’ll find ourselves broke, lonely, and exhausted. Something beyond self-care is needed to thrive in the modern world. I would advocate for a spiritual and social reformation, a rediscovery of those tried-and-true values, relationships, and religions that resist the consumer mindset and find joy in those things which are free. We can only hope that eye masks, CBD oils, pedicures, and house plants can sustain us until that reformation arrives.