this is why you practice self-care and you’re still miserable at work.
You and I may be living the same life in different fonts. You vacuum your room or fold your sweaters each time they stick out of your drawer. When you remember to meditate, you dust the cobwebs off of the Headspace app on your phone and put on a track for 10 minutes, or you may have read some of Zen in the Art of Archery or Thich Nhat Hanh. Maybe after scrolling through your FYP page for half an hour, you discover a Tiktok on how to roll out a tendon in your leg that you never knew you had, holding tension in your mental background for years, so you stretch it out for three to four days and then proceed to forget about it again.
We may not be the same. You follow your own regimen and hopefully, in some capacity, have your own set of tools and resources, or at least, are finding some. Or maybe, you don’t have these resources, you don’t have the privilege of time, and that’s okay too. However, you and I, all of us, who have entered the workforce of late-stage capitalism, which has historically prioritized our output over our health, feel the pressure to build a self-care regimen in order to keep ourselves together. Once a ball drops in NYC every single year, we recommit ourselves to vows which we know our fleeting; we’ll read more, we’ll get off our phones, we’ll work out, we’ll reinvest into our spiritual health. We tell ourselves these vapid vows, meant well, in an effort to protect ourselves from 40-hour workweeks and relentless credit hours which, around the world, work many low-income people to death.
Self-care, apart from labor, isn’t a bad thing, however, wellness no longer exists in a vacuum. Self-care either operates symbiotically with our work or, when self-care exists outside of the context of work, it most likely isn’t being called self-care. When I talk about self-care, I mean the industry that grosses billions of dollars each year, that profits off of the promises I make to myself, the dreams I have of my ideal “work-life balance,” green juices, city bike subscriptions, sourdough starters and 15-minute ab workouts on Youtube.
When “self-care” as we understand it today, isn’t a part of our spiritual health, but a reaction to a work pace that pushes us to exhaustion every single week, one wonders whether self-care is the solution to work fatigue, or rather, a tactic to divert us from addressing a much larger issue: if companies are using self-care to suggest to us that instead of advocating for policy that standardizes shorter work hours and better work benefits, that the reason that we are miserable is that we are not taking care of ourselves.
Self-care won’t disappear by tomorrow, but I believe that self-care, as it culturally exists today, has a serious problem, because self-care has become an excuse for employers to put the onus of wellness and community care on their own workers, instead of engaging in robust institutional reform.
Instead of adopting more paid leave programs, mirroring union standards, and putting more resources in place that make work culture more sustainable, Americans are using Instagram-friendly “self-care” culture to evade a critical discussion: the cost of “productivity” on our spiritual and physical health.
In many ways, this movement has also enabled ableism in the workplace. If current conversations about workplace sustainability devolve into what individuals are supposed to do to “take care of themselves,” where does that leave autistic people, people with physical disabilities, who require that their work environments be accessible and have the resourcing to accommodate them? The new self-care movement has eclipsed them in the process.
Self-care has not always existed like this. When the phrase was initially coined, it was a strategy used by activists, so that protestors in the late 20th century remembered to take care of themselves during large strikes and demonstrations, as well as pace themselves when faced with the reticence of American politics.
What I think was meant by this act, was that self-care was never meant to be a long-term solution, rather, a way to manage themselves until change came. That is wildly different from how we may associate it now.
Our burnout is valid. Chamomile tea, alone, will not bring about workplace reform and liberation. This is what I hope to communicate in this short piece. This piece doesn’t offer a solution because, frankly, I don’t know what my next wellness routine is going to be either, but I know that it is going to include some deep thinking. It is going to include imagining myself outside of work, telling myself that I was not built for the sole purpose of working and creating output. I don’t fantasize about work and that doesn’t make me lazy or irrational. It only means that I believe that there are things that are more important.
