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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 collective, systemic change.
As an autistic person who faces marginalization in many ways, I’ve felt this pressure to constantly optimize and improve myself in order to fit into the dominant culture. “You just have to adapt,” they would tell me as if the “logic” of our colonizing societies was fundamentally just and cared about my well-being. But the reality is that my ability to engage in self-care practices is heavily influenced by factors largely beyond my control, such as my socioeconomic status, race and gender.
The self-care movement, often fueled by the booming self-help industry, tends to individualize systemic issues, framing them as personal, even moral, failings. This approach further marginalizes those who are already the most vulnerable. The self-help industry, valued at over $40 billion globally, perpetuates a vicious cycle that keeps the gears of the capitalist machine turning smoothly, creating a revenue stream for billionaires…
