Relaxation is big business.The countless websites, apps, Instagram pages, TikTok accounts, and influencers built around it are mostly going to stick around because it should have been around all along.But it can be a lot.
Somewhere along the way, mental health advice and the actionable techniques within the Self-Care Industrial Complex became as stressful as the very reasons we need them.It just became another task to complete that will riddle you with anxiety and self-loathing when you find it too difficult to squeeze into your schedule.
At that point, if you're not feeling okay, it's not because the world has ruined everything.It's that you didn't stretch enough, you didn't box breathe hard enough, you didn't cozy up to a fireplace enough.
Self-care becomes a treadmill unto itself; it becomes its own kind of work.Not relaxing work; more of a performance-review kind of work.
I recently wrote about how all apps feel the same now and how so many of them include addictive gameplay loops designed to keep you coming back.Like streaks that supposedly make you feel a sense of accomplishment for having Interacted with it multiple days in a row.
Those streaks are inherently stressful, and yet a highly recommended meditation app I started using last year includes streaks.
I don't need self-care to come with a metric.I don't need to be told that I'm resting wrong.A guide can help, but not a taskmaster, not Lee Army Ermey screaming at me while he's wearing yoga pants.
This is how capitalism colonizes your inner life.First, it destroys your mental health.Then it sells you a system for fixing it, complete with routines, checklists, streaks, and the subtle implication that you're doing it wrong, you idiot.
Everything has been optimized to within an inch of its life.Abundance is capitalism's great innovation; the min-maxing of everything is the new metric for success.Squeezing blood from a stone, wringing every last bit of optimization out of every system possible, which ultimately means making more and more and doing more and more for less and less to maximize everything at the expense of your health and sanity.
When self-care has been industrialized the way it has, it stops feeling additive to your life and becomes maintenance, just a treadmill that simulates progress when you haven't moved an inch, and all so you can just exist another day within a broken system.
