Self-Care Has Failed Us
It's time for something…softer.
Words are spells. But what happens when a word loses its magic?
That's exactly how I've started to feel about "self-care." Once meaningful, now hollow—drained by commercialization, overuse, and cultural inertia.
Self-care has become a catch-all term, weighed down by elaborate planning and idealized outcomes. It offers relief "someday," but "someday" means nothing when you're in crisis right now. Every product gets repackaged as self-care—without sincerity or depth. These marketed routines rarely give us real rest; they quietly remind us even our downtime serves productivity.
When I was a CEO struggling with chronic physical pain along with, anxiety, depression, and OCD, traditional self-care routines often intensified my symptoms—especially during the peak of the pandemic. Everything required effort I simply didn't have.
So I started extracting things from my life—appointments requiring driving, sessions that might require hours of preparing, followed of decompression—any type of excessive cleanup. I also shopped less to giving me the chance to reduce how much I had to open and break down boxes. I turned toward easy, somatic practices that took little energy but reliably left me feeling grounded, like tapping, Qigong, ear seeds, and long magnesium baths. This shift in approach changed everything for me.
That's when I decided to start using the word self-soothe.