I am 19 years old. Lately, I have felt like a 40-year-old with five kids, a broken dream, and a mortgage, sitting on a back porch swing wondering where the days went. I have realized that Groundhog Day is more than if that little furry guy wakes up and sees his shadow to predict the future, but looks a lot more like I am living the same day over and over again, broken up by different movies that I am watching and a new bad news story. Naturally, I have been complaining to my friends like they are unpaid therapists, and the most recurring piece of advice is to have a “self-care day,” or an hour, or please God, even a minute.
Most of the time, my sticky note and planner that dictates my every move, every day by the half hour, does not allow me to have much time to myself to sit down and think of ways to take my mind off of my daily tasks, running around like I’m a “Papa’s Pizzeria” worker, under a shifty labor contract where I have to run a whole store by myself. However, I have put in the effort to find something that takes my mind off things, going to my trusty friend social media for some inspiration like social media is not also one of the reasons I feel my mental state deteriorating.
There I found that self-care is its own little inspiration industry. There are whole blogs fueled with prettily packaged products and planners that promote self-reflection rather than writing down what time you have class. All the people that run the accounts have dewy skin instead of breaking out from stress and perfect bodies from regulating their time at the gym, so why would you not be enticed to analyze their Instagram stories with pastel colored “Love Yourself” infographics? They are the tycoons of body positivity and proclaimers of “everyone has the same 24 hours in a day.”
While this works for their million of followers, or at least seems like it from their comments filled with praise, it doesn’t exactly work for me. I thought maybe it is just because I’m a teenage dirtbag with not enough “clean girl aesthetic” to understand how eating a piece of fruit or putting it in your water bottle will take away all your problems. It turns out that there are just a few fundamental problems I see with promoting toxic positivity to a crowd that is just looking for a moment to breathe.
1. Earning your self-care
Being the toxic workaholic I am, I first looked for self-care regimes that also took into account the workload that I have, which is the size of a tidal wave that’s constantly barrelling towards me. I was looking for a routine that would tell me how to squeeze my workload into a couple hours, prioritizing efficiency and allowing me to have enough time at night to watch a Disney Channel Original Movie before bed.
Unfortunately, all I found were schedules that still had me working until 2 a.m., with little breaks in-between. On the surface level, my frustration came with what they would call these breaks. To fit with the chill vibe that they were trying to create, they called the break “recess” or “snack time.” This schedule is not whimsical if I have to wait until the middle of the night to go to bed; do not make it sound like I get to go on monkey bars in the middle of writing two 1,000 word articles.
On a deeper level, this made me feel like I had to earn the breaks that I get by doing more work before I can let myself breathe, which is already a problem I have. This only made me feel worse about turning to another source for self-care, depicting that it was futile to change my mindset about work and ultimately keeping me stressed.
For profiles that claimed that they were well-adjusted with school after writing up these work plans, I don’t know one person that looks that well-rested or feels that positive after staying up until 2 a.m. to turn in a discussion post.
2. The Price is Right
A lot of self-care profiles are as subtle with advertisements as a product placement in a made-for-TV movie. They promote products for skin care that go for $60 a bottle on the shelves and say things like “I can’t live without this.” Well, I can live with it, as I would lose my apartment and money to buy the fruit and vegetables that you are telling me I would feel much more balanced with.
The self-care Instagram industry runs on a capitalistic hellscape comparable to the conspiracy theories that your mom tells you from her Facebook. Influencers don’t label when something is an advertisement or not, leaving it up to the imagination if she is getting paid or truly believes that this will help calm you down after a long day. Everything is high-end, in-trend, and on-brand when it comes to self-care products, keeping your wallet empty – only heightening at least one of the biggest fears young people have.
The bottom line is that the message is received loud and clear: being unstressed is an elitist sport with no winner. The more money that you have, the more likely you are to find a solution that works for you. However, the more money you have, the less likely you are to be in a situation where you are so stressed out that you are looking for outside sources of happiness. The self-care industry jacks up the price and we raise them to it, allowing for demand and prices to soar through the roof with apps like TikTok blowing up every product that an insecure teen would want.
3. “You’re young. Act like it.”
The mindset online when it comes to soothing the dredges of being in college and broke and scared of your future and terrified of what comes with being in the determining time where you could either become a college dropout or the next Barbara Walters is to embrace that scariness. Like I don’t look at it sideways everyday, the girls online say “you’re young, just embrace the nervousness, it will all be figured out in the end,” telling you to stare it straight down.
I can take part of that into account. I do have a lot of time to work, specifically the rest of my life. However, this sentiment seems a little tone deaf to me, and probably to a lot of college goers that have to pay for their own education through scholarships and jobs, adding tension to their life. God forbid you need money and have an undying ambition, then you really have problems. Also, don’t forget that schools across America, including my own, have been under constant fear that going to class and doing all the right things may still end in us not having many years left because of the epidemic of gun violence. There’s always that too.
Saying that I’m young and that I just have to act like it is like telling me to swim against a current of events that were made to weaken my arms. Of course, I am going to have my messy moments and carefree nights where all I care about is shaking ass with my friends, but I can’t be young and carefree all the time. Young does not equate to easy to everyone.
4. This will all be fixed with a bullet journal
The biggest issue with all of this performative support from the internet is that I think they peddle the idea that mental health issues like anxiety and depression can be solved in something easy you can do for yourself like drinking water. Sometimes it is not that easy and we still feel bad after. Then you failed. And then everything feels worse because everyone else is fixed with a 10 minute write-and-weep in a bullet journal. These things can help, but this is not the end-all-be-all for many people who are truly searching for something real and helpful, something that the internet almost never provides to those most vulnerable.
This will not all be fixed with a bullet journal. Almost half of college students are still going to report symptoms of depression or anxiety. This is still one of the most contentious times for familial and romantic relationships. The mainstream self-care industry sees that, and they don’t care. They have realized they can capitalize on young people and their issues, and they won’t stop as long as they still see us posting us crying on the internet and looking for the next sleep mask so we can sleep at night instead of being plagued by stress-induced insomnia.
I’ll buy the bullet journal; I like writing. What I like more though is self-awareness when it comes to what is being marketed to young people and what truly will help them with the societal increase of stress we have on our hands that hasn’t dipped since the beginning of the social media that peddles it.