Christine Rosen uses her regular Commentary column to delve into the dubious nature of the modern-day focus on “self-care.”
Self-care is less an organized industry than it is an emerging (and maddeningly vague) philosophy of life that is gaining ever larger numbers of devotees, especially online. Tumblr features many posts tagged “self-care” that include advice such as “You are valid” and “Fall deeply in love with yourself.” There are “self-care band-aid tattoos” on offer from a company called Motivational Tattoo that feature uplifting reminders such as “I am enough” and “Calm.” …
… Building on the decades-long growth of the happiness industry, which has brought the world corporate “chief happiness officers” and on-site office napping pods, self-care has emerged as the perfectly soothing remedy for our new age of anxiety. It offers a conveniently flattering rationale for our growing feelings of powerlessness and the resulting desire to retreat inward. We’re not entitled, lazy, or merely misguided; we’re “struggling with self-care,” as one online questionnaire described it. …
… If self-care remained the province of crystal-wielding healers and social-media celebrities, it would, like the craze for matcha tea, soon fade. But the ethos of self-care is finding its way into the broader culture, with disturbing results. Like the word “diversity,” the seemingly innocuous phrase “self-care” is politically freighted both because it is difficult to challenge—for after all, who could be against taking care of yourself?—and because it mistakes self-indulgence for self-reliance. …
… [T]he left’s criticism of self-care is as misguided as the philosophy itself. It implies that the ethos of hard work and rugged individualism that has formed the basis for much of America’s success is a con rather than a reality. As one self-care advocate wrote on Lifehacker, “Most of us grew up believing that the more you sacrifice, the bigger the reward.” That was, evidently, a lie. “It’s easy to take the ‘hard work pays off’ adage too far, to the point that it becomes counterproductive.” But “hard work pays off” isn’t an adage, it’s a value statement, and alas, it’s one whose power has faded in recent years. …
… The real question is why the modern person’s sense of self has become so fragile that it can’t cope with the mundane experience of unhappiness. Self-care doesn’t encourage the development of self in the sense that we have long understood it (such as David Hume’s notion of the self as a kind of commonwealth or David Riesman’s taxonomy of inner-directed and other-directed individuals). It isn’t part of a larger project of self-knowledge intended to make us better people; it just wants us to feel comfortable. …
… For conservatives, the self-care message is pernicious because it shifts responsibility away from what you can do for yourself (undermining values such as self-reliance, individualism, service, and entrepreneurial spirit) and toward the supposedly terrible things the world is doing to you. Unhealthy? Must be the fault of the industrial food lobby that makes so much bad processed food. Stressed out? Definitely the fault of your employer, who should give you more paid personal days off. The self-care ethos elevates feelings over action and embraces the pursuit of self-satisfaction as an end in itself, encouraging a rather masturbatory approach to civic life. It traffics in the language of retreat rather than resilience; self-care advocates urge you to “protect” your schedule, “defend” your me-time.
Is it surprising that a generation being reared on a message of self-care rather than self-reliance would view “safe spaces” as an entitlement and the offensive, the odd, and the politically incorrect as tangibly threatening to their health? No, but such campaigns against singularity for the purposes of collective “self-care” will leave them unprepared to face reality.
