Your feed is full of invitations to take care of yourself. Meditate for ten minutes. Try a digital detox. Invest in a better skincare routine. Light that candle, draw that bath. The messaging is warm, encouraging, and seemingly beyond political critique. After all, who could possibly argue against people caring for their own wellbeing?

But beneath this gentle surface lies a specific political logic — one that consistently locates the source of suffering and its remedy inside the individual body and mind. When chronic burnout is treated as a personal failure to set boundaries rather than the predictable outcome of exploitative labor conditions, something deeply ideological is at work. The question isn't whether rest matters. It's who benefits from framing exhaustion as a private problem.

The trajectory of self-care — from a radical Black feminist survival strategy to a billion-dollar consumer category — reveals how power operates through the quiet act of depoliticization. Understanding this transformation isn't about dismissing anyone's coping mechanisms. It's about asking whose interests are served when structural problems get repackaged as personal wellness deficits.

When Audre Lorde wrote that caring for herself was not self-indulgence but 'self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,' she wasn't recommending a spa day. She was a Black lesbian feminist living with cancer in a society that actively worked to erase people like her. Self-care, in this original context, meant the radical insistence on surviving within systems designed to produce your destruction. It was defiance, not relaxation. The very act of resting was political because rest was being systematically denied.

This wasn't about individual lifestyle optimization. Lorde's framework understood that the personal is political — that the health, exhaustion, and emotional depletion of marginalized people were direct products of political structures, not personal shortcomings. Caring for yourself was resistance precisely because the system was invested in your depletion. The practice made no sense divorced from the structural analysis that gave it meaning.

The migration of self-care into mainstream wellness culture over the following decades required stripping away this structural analysis entirely. What remained was the form — the emphasis on personal practices of restoration — without the content: the recognition that the need for such restoration is itself a political condition. A concept born from resistance was hollowed out and refilled with consumer logic. The result now functions almost exactly opposite to its original purpose.

Today's commodified self-care doesn't challenge the conditions that exhaust people. It sells them products to manage that exhaustion more comfortably. The underlying ideology tells us that the system is a given — our only task is to navigate it more skillfully through better morning routines, premium meditation subscriptions, and curated consumption. This is depoliticization in action: a radical concept absorbed by the market and returned to us as a product. What was once a challenge to power became a revenue stream for it.

Takeaway

When a radical concept becomes a consumer product, it doesn't just lose its edge — it often begins to serve the very power it was designed to resist. The question to ask of any political idea that goes mainstream isn't whether it's popular, but what was removed to make it palatable.

The self-care industry presents its offerings as universally accessible wisdom. Anyone can practice gratitude. Anyone can prioritize their wellbeing. But the material conditions required to actually follow through on this advice — disposable income, leisure time, job security, physical safety, a body not already pushed to its limits — are distributed according to class position. The universalist language of self-care masks a deeply class-specific practice.

Consider the actual infrastructure of contemporary self-care: therapy sessions at market rates, gym memberships, organic food, yoga retreats, curated skincare routines, wellness apps with monthly subscriptions. Even the supposedly free practices — meditation, journaling, long walks — presuppose a home with quiet space, a neighborhood safe enough to walk in, and a schedule with margins wide enough to accommodate stillness. These are not neutral conditions. They are class privileges rendered invisible by the language of personal choice.

The people most in need of care — underpaid workers managing multiple jobs, caregivers without institutional support, communities bearing the disproportionate health consequences of environmental racism — are precisely the people least able to access what the self-care market offers. The cruelest dimension is that these same people are then told, through a thousand cultural messages, that their suffering reflects insufficient self-management. The structural cause of their exhaustion is erased. Personal responsibility is assigned in its place.

This is not accidental but a function of how ideology operates. By framing wellbeing as an individual achievement rather than a collective condition, self-care discourse naturalizes class inequality. Those with resources appear disciplined and self-aware. Those without appear negligent or lacking in self-respect. The material question — who has access to the conditions that produce health — disappears behind a moral narrative about personal choices and priorities. The political dimension of wellness is rendered invisible, which is precisely the point.

Takeaway

Any solution framed as universal but requiring specific material conditions to practice is not universal at all — it is a class privilege disguised as common sense. When you hear 'anyone can do this,' ask who actually can.

If individualized self-care depoliticizes suffering, the alternative isn't to abandon care altogether but to repoliticize it. This means developing frameworks of collective care — approaches that understand wellbeing as produced through social conditions and therefore requiring social, not merely personal, solutions. The question shifts from 'How do I take better care of myself?' to 'How do we build structures that take care of each other?'

Mutual aid networks offer one concrete model. Unlike charity, which preserves hierarchical relations between giver and receiver, mutual aid operates on the principle of solidarity — the recognition that our fates are bound together and that care flows in multiple directions. These networks have deep historical roots in marginalized communities precisely because those communities have always understood what mainstream culture is only now beginning to acknowledge: that individual resilience is no substitute for collective infrastructure.

Beyond informal networks, collective care also means fighting for structural transformation: universal healthcare, paid family leave, living wages, affordable housing, environmental justice. These are care policies. They address the conditions that produce illness, exhaustion, and psychological distress rather than asking individuals to manage the symptoms on their own. Framing these demands as care — rather than as abstract policy debates — reveals their intimate connection to the daily, bodily experience of wellbeing and suffering.

This reframing also recovers what was most powerful in Lorde's original insight. Care becomes political again — not because you buy the right products, but because you organize to change the conditions that make people sick. The question isn't whether individuals should rest, set boundaries, or seek joy. Of course they should. The deeper question is whether we accept a framework where those personal acts are treated as sufficient responses to problems that are fundamentally structural in nature. Personal restoration matters. But it cannot substitute for collective transformation.

Takeaway

Care that only addresses symptoms while leaving structures intact isn't apolitical — it's politically conservative, whether it intends to be or not. Genuine care means asking not just what helps individuals cope but what would make coping unnecessary.

The hidden class politics of self-care aren't hidden because they're especially complex. They're hidden because the dominant culture has a deep investment in keeping them invisible. When suffering is individualized, the structures that produce it escape scrutiny. When wellness becomes a consumer category, the market profits from the very conditions it declines to challenge.

Recognizing this doesn't mean guilt about your morning routine or your therapy appointments. It means refusing to let personal coping strategies stand in for political analysis and collective action.

The most radical act of care might not be something you do for yourself at all. It might be the slow, difficult work of building a world where survival doesn't require warfare in the first place.