Generation treat yo' self: the problem with 'self-care'

Yes, it’s true: Donald Trump is gaslighting us all, and the media is lending him a helping hand. The news gets more surreal every day: secret sources, Russian rendezvous, pizza-based pedophile conspiracies. A constant cacophony of the outrageous and the outraged; an increasing disregard for the distinction between fact and fiction.

Every time I look at Twitter, I feel like I’m going slowly insane.

So I don’t read the news as much as I did. I don’t go on social media as much as I used to. I’ve started to retreat inwards. I read books and walk my dog and try to ignore the dumpster fire going on outside, the smell of democracy burning. I’m not sure how to usefully engage with what’s happening, so, for the time being, I’ve stopped engaging at all.

You could call my behavior “selfish” or you could call it “self-care”. You’ve probably heard the term; it’s become a bit of a buzzword. As the political climate has grown more turbulent, interest in self-care has risen. Google searches for the term reached a five-year high immediately after the election last November.

However, as with many zeitgeisty phrases (think: “clean-eating” or “wellness”), the vogue-ishness comes with a certain vagueness. Self-care seems to mean anything and everything: if an activity (or inactivity) makes you feel better, in body or mind, then it’s self-care. It could be yoga or cooking or simply turning off the news.

While self-care may sound like a wishy-washy idea recently coined by a holistic therapist in LA, it actually has a Platonic pedigree and a very pointed political purpose. The French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the ancient Greeks saw it as integral to democracy: self-care was a necessary part of care for others. It made you a better, more honest citizen.

When you’re part of a marginalized group, it’s even more important. Indeed, it’s what keeps you going. In an essay in her 1988 book, A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde wrote that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”. Lorde was a black lesbian feminist poet, all of which, she said, “meant being really invisible”. In a world that is constantly trying to erase your selfhood and deny your self-worth, choosing to focus on yourself really is a radical act.

Almost 30 years on, Lorde’s point is still being reflected in popular culture. On her latest album, Solange has a song called Borderline (An Ode to Self Care). Its lyrics are heavy with fatigue and plead for some time out:

Baby, you know you’re tired / Know I’m tired / Let’s take it off tonight … Baby, it’s war outside these walls / A safe place tonight / Let’s play it safe tonight.

Discussing the song in an interview with W magazine, Solange elaborated on what self-care means to her: “Even in the midst of this last week with the multiple murders of young black men that occurred, I chose this time not to watch. Just for the sake of being able to exist in that day, to exist without rage, and exist without heartbreak … I sometimes have to choose to not look … Sometimes throughout that, [self-care] becomes a mission within itself. That song was an ode to how our home becomes a safe space.”

Unfortunately, self-care runs the risk of becoming more meaningless than ever. It’s become co-opted by market forces and consumerized.

You can now buy self-care nail decals and cute self-care kits. A new line of massage chairs even carries the tagline “the science of self care”. Self-care has also become a carefully curated lifestyle choice to show off: there are more than 1.4m photos hashtagged #selfcare on Instagram. Many of these seem to consist of skinny women doing yoga poses, legs in bubble baths, non-caffeinated-non-dairy hot drinks, gluten-free berry-based desserts, green juice in mason jars, that sort of thing. It’s basically Treat Yo’ Self in slightly superior clothing.

It’s nice to think that our bubble baths and personal time might have a larger political purpose (“Um, Foucault! I’m not just bingeing Netflix – I’m engaging in Platonic political philosophy in order to better serve others!”), but more often than not, our acts of self-care are simply acts of privilege.

Rather than being a route to social change, self-care has become a destination in itself.

In a recent interview with the Chicago Reader, Jamie Kalven, a writer and human rights activist, says he is worried one of the dangers of the imminent Trump regime is “that people will … become demoralized and retreat into denial, that they will seek refuge amid the pleasures and fulfillment of private life. That would give carte blanche to power. There was a term used in central Europe to describe those who opted to retreat into private life under totalitarianism. They were called ‘internal emigres’.”

He goes on to point out that “privileged sectors of our society are already heavily skewed that way. It’s a real danger at a time like this. If we withdraw from public engagement now, we aid and abet that which we deplore.”

America is becoming a foreign country, one in which many of us no longer feel entirely at home. For those of us buffered by socioeconomic privilege, internal emigration justified as “self-care” is becoming increasingly tempting. It’s certainly more convenient than moving to Canada. But we need to stay vigilant: one sip of self-care can quickly become the whole bottle. Let’s not spend the next four years in a comfortable stupor of solipsism.