The Limits of Self-Care
The self-care movement has become ubiquitous in our culture today. Social media feeds are flooded with tips and hacks for personal productivity, mindfulness practices, and elaborate self-care rituals. Wellness retreats, personalized coaching, and a whole industry of self-improvement products promise to help us overcome the challenges we face and thrive in our fast-paced, high-stress world.
But as I’ve looked closer at this phenomenon, I’ve started to notice some troubling patterns.
The dominant narrative of self-care often places the responsibility squarely on the individual to manage the harms and stresses of our economic system.
The message is clear: if you just try hard enough, if you find the right combination of self-care practices, you can overcome any obstacle through personal growth and transformation.
This individualistic framing fails to adequately address the systemic issues at the heart of the problems we’re trying to solve.
Things like poverty, racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression aren’t just individual failings — they’re the result of deep-rooted inequalities and structural injustices. Telling people to simply “adapt” better is a dangerous distraction from the need for…
