#10: Treat yourself and you'll be fine
How did we go from knowing oneself to stockpiling expensive bath bombs?
10 issues of Kindred Spirits! Thank you to all of you who support this newsletter. It’s equal parts heartening and humbling to know that these subscriptions come from conscious intention, and not outside forces. It feels especially important during these times.
The venue is an amphitheatre of ancient times, all crumbling walls and imposing angles. It's made to seem even bigger by the roar of the crowds — calls goaded by bloodlust ringing off the stone and careening into each other mid-air. Off to the side stands a battle-scar-decorated gladiator, separated from the crowds and the arena by a singular wrought iron gate, tipped with steel to reinforce its authority. As the gate creaks upwards, the jeers and goading grows stronger, stronger still until the gladiator feels physically buffeted to the centre. A hush, and then wild roaring as two more gates on either side swing open, letting out the two monsters the gladiator is to face: 40 Hour Weeks and Severe Anxiety.
And over the frenzy, over the blood-curling screams masked by a savage, frantic cheering, booms a voice issuing one command: "TREAT YOURSELF AND YOU'LL BE FINE!"
Perhaps I undersell how capitalist self-care actually plays out. It's not so much a see-through declaration of the monetisation of personal time as a veiled play on vulnerabilities for financial gain. "Self-care", for one, is posited as the magic bullet to all your problems, hidden exploitation notwithstanding.
The narrative is so oversimplified today, it has become, "if you soaked in the bath (sorry for you if you don't have one) with ABC bath bomb, your life will miraculously re-align". I can't tell you how many times I've dunked myself in a bottle of luxurious bubble bath and, even while marinating in the soapy bougie fragrant liquid, thought, "I still have to work till 9 PM tomorrow to add to my bank account". There's a tangential argument just waiting to be made here —about the privilege of indulging in today's 'self-care'— but perhaps we'll get to that another time.
One of my recent favourite topics to read about is the evolution of self-care: from the burden of knowing oneself, to the mid-level navel-gazing, to the superficial creams and wine-addled nights that dominate the definition today.
The Greeks got it right first, according to Foucault. Epimelesthai sautou —"to take care of yourself"— was one of the foundational principles of their great cities, and a decisive rule for how to go about life.
Somewhere along the way, when the Big Bang of religion-fuelled morality and then secularity and external law occurred, "to take care of yourself" went out the window. Self-renunciation became the foundation for salvation, and social morality set down rules for individuals in relation to other people. The narrative then spun into a new form — "know thyself". Know thy place, know thy standing before the Oracle and God, know what thou wish to ask well before consulting forces larger than thyself.
Foucault also advised that one "must become the doctor of oneself". That pretty much became the definition of self-care in the '80s and '90s, when self-care meant taking additional responsibility over their health in conjunction with what their doctors and physicians described. This is a far cry from becoming one's own doctor today, which I daresay involves a futile hour spent on WebMD and all illnesses under the sun diagnosed as some godforsaken form of cancer.
My mans Foucault, and Plato, Socrates and the like, probably didn't foresee the concept of "know thyself" and "care for oneself" veering so off-course in the 21st century. We've left the idea of self-care as a foundation of society behind, and have commercialised the idea of taking care of ourselves. It's conflated with spending money indulgently to achieve phrases (and not phases), like "a little bit of relaxation". The existence of an actual percentage rule governing how much of your income to spend on "treating yourself" blew my mind — 50% on rent and utilities, 20% as savings and a whopping 30% on self-care.
It's unfortunate that this has happened hand in hand with other exploitative capitalist tendencies, including longer working hours, the demonisation of rest and a culture that rewards being "always on". The reduction of self-care to self-indulgence has given us less time with ourselves and more time pandering to acceptable methods of taking care of oneself. We're only giving outwards, to a system that has colonised one more space that was reserved for ourselves and our individual growth.
We've recruited ancient disciplines such as Yoga and sacred practices such as mindfulness —from Vedantism, Taoism and Buddhism among other spiritual discourses— to drive home warped notions of self-care. We're reshaping and repackaging the same ideals in new bottles, continuing the commondification fo self-care until its an exclusive, neo-colonial domain available only to those who have the money to spend on it. The 38.2 million posts under the #selfcare Instagram hashtag are testament enough to this. We've also normalised these ideals of self-care being used as a cheap replacement for the social welfare and mental health support systems we're entitled to.
There is another discourse running parallel to that of commodified self-care, and that’s self-care as an act of rebellion. Audre Lorde called it "self-reservation", while AOC recently said the "key to beauty is the inside job". Many others look to break out of the box, to use the actual act of knowing oneself to push boundaries and challenge ourselves. It’s an interesting shift in the evolution of self-care, one that’s reclaiming lost space and is therefore worth paying close attention to.
On the personal front, I've subscribed to many capitalistic notions of self-care — and my wallet is all the lighter for it — but I look forward to re-evaluating my options and creating space for long-term growth and glow.