Self-care isn't helping us
Our peace and planet are being destroyed right before our eyes, and we are told to "self-care" as our bloodthirsty officials are profiting off our sufferings.
Last night, I witnessed a man in despair holding the beheaded body of his baby, as well as men dragging charred bodies out of the rubbles in Rafah. I started weeping out of rage and exhaustion to have to witness these atrocities still happening, telling myself that no amount of self-care is going to make me cope in a genocide, and that it is time for us all to stop lying to ourselves.
Three days ago, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ordered Israel to halt its military operations in Rafah. Israel did not like that and decided to retaliate even stronger, leading to the atrocities I mentioned in the lead of this piece. I headed to bed full of rage, and when I rage, I weep profusely. It is my way to out my anger and frustration and in some way a kind of self-care to let my body do its own thing, and I know it is a healthy way of dealing with my emotions. Yet it does not lift the frustration and pain of feeling powerless in times of injustices, it is a quick fix that does not help in the long run. In general, what we are being told about self-care is not healing ourselves or our surroundings, it just aids at coping better with the awful state of this world whilst scarring ourselves deeper and deeper.
Self-caring, but at what cost?
As our western society is declining day by day and hope is becoming a distant mirage, we are struggling to live with ourselves properly. Yet, this capitalistic world needs us to keep operating as if things were normal. For that to happen, it needs to introduce new coping mechanisms. Then enters self-care.
The self-care industry has been booming for the past few years, and it is no coincidence: we live in an F’ed up world that is eating us alive and making it harder to truly function as intended. In response, we try to find ways to better ourselves in hope it will better our worsening conditions. The thing is, putting the blame on the individual is just enforcing the individualistic aspect that makes capitalism thrive. It divides us further because if YOU are the problem, YOU are the one needing a fix yet YOUR problem is a result of the system. See it like this: you are stressed at work because you are expected to fulfil tasks that can’t be handled by one person, but your company can’t be bothered to hire more people because it wants to save money (nice way to say make more profits that will benefit your higher-ups). And because you are in a constant state of stress, it takes a toll on your body and psyche, which lead you to burn out or depression. But you can’t afford to be burned out or depressed because you might lose your job or don’t get enough benefits to support you on your recovery journey, so you just power through and try out all the self-care alternatives you find: yoga, Pilates, essential oils, burning sage, therapy, self-help books, etc. Here is the kicker, though: to be able to afford any of those alternatives, you need to keep your job because the money you get from that job is your lifeline to get better and take care of yourself. So now you stress some more because you have stay in an unhealthy environment so you can afford to get healthy somehow?
Capitalism has turned productivity into an asset. If you are constantly busy, it shows how hard-working you are. Are you even trying if you are not hustling your ass off? Bragging about having free time and slouching around and do nothing? How incompetent are you? Don’t you know that it makes you look bad to enjoy life with activities that do not require partaking in full-blown capitalism? (even though, everything we do in this system is inherently capitalistic, but whatever). You complain about not earning much money, but you want to rest, work less and still enjoy life? How dare you even request such human conditions? Please note the sarcasm in all of these questions, I am at a point where I would rather laugh at the blatant disregard of human life than cry at how horrible we are being treated (see, another coping mechanism!). Allow me to close off this chapter with this very deep quote by no other than Kim Kardashian, herself: Nobody wants to work these days. Get your ass up and work! How do we love being scolded by a multi-millionaire woman who made her millions relying on people like us throwing our hard-earned money to whatever new endeavours she comes up with, right fellas?
Surviving to live
Funnily enough, Kim K and people like her that are part of the rich and wealthy are always the ones telling us that the reason we don’t get by with life is because of our unwillingness to work whilst the most hard-working people I know are juggling multiple jobs just to make ends meet. We are not unwilling to work because if we don’t work we don’t survive. We are unwilling to be treated like rubbish and have deplorable working conditions just so the people at the top get to make millions or billions on our backs! Furthermore, we are not asking for the moon, just decency and respectability.
It is humiliating to have to struggle to live. And because we put the blame on the individual, too many people feel scared to ask for help because why would people help if WE are the problem? So we dig ourselves deeper in a mess that could have been avoidable if the emphasis on collective solidarity existed. Because WE ARE NOT the problem, the system IS our problem! Nobody willingly drag themselves into unbearable living conditions, they get to that point because there are no proper instances in place to come to help. It is always a disgracing bureaucratic process we have to go through where you have to prove how struggling you are to get just a tiny bit of help from the very government you pay taxes to every year. It is exhausting, time-consuming in a world where your time is valuable and makes you money, and again just very humiliating. The farce in all of this is that you are getting yourself in an even more stressful situation without the guarantee to even have a positive outcome in the end.
Now, if you succeed in getting some financial alleviations from your government, your problems are not all gone. All the people I know who benefit from government money are still greatly struggling, which sends them into a bigger loop of despair because how do they still have to tighten the belt so hard when they got privileged enough to have some alleviations? The response is quite simple: it is beneficial for the government and the system it operates on (capitalism) to keep people struggling. Poverty and awful living conditions are a political choice that benefit the ruling class whilst subjugating the people into obedience to partake against their will in this death-cult system. You can take all the self-care alternatives you want, it won’t change the course of the system because even therapy is built in accordance with neoliberal capitalism. The aim of a therapy session is not really to help you get better per se, but to give you tools to better cope with the system. I briefly touched upon it in my previous piece (btw, thank you for the love on this piece, truly means the world) because it never made sense to me as we live in a deeply sick apparatus, how can we really heal when the system itself is unhealthy?
From fire to freedom
If a house catches fire, you can save the inhabitants and the belongings, but the fire will keep on ravaging the house if you don’t put it out. Capitalism is our house, and we are the inhabitants and belongings of that house. That house has been catching fire for decades now, and instead of putting out the flames so we can rebuild a better house and learn from our past mistakes to avoid another fire. All that has been done is just displacing people to another house. In the meantime, the fire that never got put out, caught up to multiple other houses creating an actual hellscape, killing some and injuring others. The injured are now left with irreparable trauma and if they are lucky enough, they get to be treated for it. Yet the therapy or whatever alternative they get is teaching them how to carry on life with the surrounding fires and how to save themselves from future fires…
I hope my analogy makes sense to you. I always say that we live in an actual hellscape of a world, and I say so because our governments fail to truly help us and rather have us die if it means they get to make banks. When self-care is pushed down our throats such as partaking in retreats, go to yoga, or buying whatever product that will help you get your act together, it means that it is a lucrative field that they need you to consume to gauge their profit. If self-care does not heavily promote rest, the right of laziness, bearing witness, community organising and collective solidarity, it is not self-care, but another capitalistic venture meant to keep you in place in the status quo.
I refuse to partake in a self-care system that tells me that I am the problem and that the only way to fix myself is to fuel the very system that is creating the problem. Even behavioural issues are a result of this F’ed up system. People in impoverished neighbourhoods are not violent because it is ‘their nature’, the violence is a response to the negligence of the system and the regime which are purposely keeping them at the margin of society. Structural violence or invisible violence is real, and it plagues many communities that resort to rebel against that violence with visible disorder. And increasing police presence is not helping at all, it is causing even more frustration because again, the root of the problem is not tackled but maintained by the very force that protects the ruling class and its capital.
What we need is each other, and all the community and collective help and love we can provide. We keep each other safe and sane. We are our own self-care, we will bring our own freedom. Community is kindness, community is strength.
Thank you Ruth !!!!!!!!!! I agree wholeheartedly. Your words reminded me of mark fisher, who says that mental health is a direct cause of capitalism, whilst capitalism profits from your subordinate state, and then Eva Illouz, who is an icon in sociology, says that therapy regulates you to function within our capitalist system. Like western therapy only liberated you enough so you are able to work again (writing right now about these two, trying to connect them).
I love how you started with self care and ended with community wellness. I also love how you are taking the time to reply to everyone here.
I’m thinking about how to build community on Substack. It’s not the only place- just one place. I think of Substack potentially as a place where we support each other.