Ask HN: Do you also hate self-care? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you also hate self-care?

15 pointstaboshame27 comments

I need to get this off my chest.

I feel like the whole self-care stuff is a marketing trying to get me to buy more products while complicating everything.

- drink X amount of water - moisturerize your skin - meditate - keep a journal - plan your day ahead, be productive

It's making me so anxious. I'm now suppose to plan my days in calendar, track everything in a time tracker, check my steps with Apple Watch, journal or track my mood, drink water even if I don't feel like it, buy some skin products. It all makes my feel like slave.

I want to wake up and do whatever the fuck I want. I have enough of hearing advice or crooked research results that will suggest me anything really. Why is it so hard to live

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> I want to wake up and do whatever the fuck I want

You can. As my dad used to say: you only need to brush the teeth you intend to keep.

Self care is kind of a silly stupid term but “self” is definitely the most important part. Humans are very different so what everyone needs is going to be different as well. Lots of people need regimen and structure and goals, and for some people pushing those things drives sales and engagement metrics so those things are what gets pushed as self care.

Self care or just taking care of yourself. It can be whatever you want it to be and exactly what you describe. Sometimes it actually means being a little bit “selfish”.

Personally I’m intentional about it and it involves none of the things you describe. For me it’s blocking out part of my work week for unstructured thinking, or making time on the weekend without the usual family agenda. It sounds silly but learning to be intentional about doing nothing has helped me handle stress really well. No marketer is gonna to tell you to do that, but a therapist might.

I’m 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself and a balanced diet and rigorous exercise routine. In the morning if my face is a little puffy I’ll put on an ice pack while doing stomach crunches. I can do 1000 now. After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a water activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial mask which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an after shave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion.

This routine seems pretty extreme.. I see a parallel to the level of meticulousness some of us have when configuring our development environments. I prefer to start my morning with a nice cup of coffee, a quick browse onStack Overflow, then launching into a meticulous code review. But remember, no alcohol in your commits because it dries your code out and makes it look older!

Techbro8615's comment is a reference/verbatim transcript to the opening bit of American Psycho (the movie): A psychotic yuppie internalizes self-care marketing to such an extent that their life turns into an infomercial. The satire is as biting now as in the 1990s, hence the cult status of the movie/book.

Edit: this reference is as obligatory here on this topic as an XKCD reference for other topics.

Appreciate the annotation, but it's akin to explaining recursion to a Lisp programmer here.

> I'm now suppose to plan my days in calendar

It's a journey. When growing up, we have parents first, then school, then employers taking care of us - either explicitly, by providing shelter, food and a stable daily schedule or implicitly, by setting parameters that channel our life into a sustainable direction. As we grow, we sometimes let these parameters take over control of our life and things gradually get out of hand, even more so today with the prevailing loneliness epidemic (google it).

Self-improvement is, of course, a prime target for marketing, but it is also a response to a particular need. Like many things, the pay-off is greater in the beginning: working out once a week yields a much greater improvement than going from 6 to 7 workouts a week. Much of the self-improvement hype focuses on the later, eg. it seems to me that the omega3 talk really targets nutrition-conscious people who count every calorie and thus face malnutrition issues.

> It's making me so anxious

It sounds like you're either at the beginning or at the end of the self-improvement journey.

> - drink X amount of water - moisturerize your skin - meditate - keep a journal - plan your day ahead, be productive

These all sound like good advice. Would your life be worse if you followed one of them?

> I want to wake up and do whatever the fuck I want

The liberal stance then would be simply not tuning into the self-improvement conversation. Yet here you are...

I do self care. I exercise. I try to take time for myself. I think it's important, at least for me, to find some space for me to be me, to unwind, to hear my own thoughts. And it's important for me to take care of my body.

I don't do anything with self-care products or marketing. That's just one more pile of stuff to get out of my face so I can hear myself think.

You sound like you're feeling unusually pushed by this stuff - like somebody, or some product, is having some success trying to make you feel guilty for not using it, and you resent it. Well, you know, it's not unreasonable to feel annoyed or even angry when someone is trying to manipulate you into giving them your money. Still, it's better to not let it get under your skin - to look at them with cynical amusement, rather than with anger and resentment. People are gonna people, and part of that is that they're going to try to find a way to get your money. And many of them will try to manipulate you if you won't give it to them on merit. It's not productive to get upset about, because you can't change all those people.

The marketing is made in such a way as to portray these activities as necessary to a productive life. "Stop being such a slob! Achieve your true potential!" It's an old trick.

I find that I just pick up self-care habits that I find useful as I age. If I have a hard time controlling my mood, meditation practice helps. If I have headaches, making myself drink more water and see more sun does help. I forget a lot of activities, so I either do a task now or write it in my calendar so I don't forget. I try not to procrastinate too much since it ends up being worse for me in the end.

But I only learned those things after failing a lot of times and becoming so fed up with the mistakes that my brain makes me do the correct thing to make things easier. And I obviously still fuck up.

Just go with the flow and try not to repeat mistakes.

These days, 99% of everything is marketing, trying to get you to buy more stuff / watch more videos / whatever. Hating self-care is an understandable reaction to that, but (unless you're "a natural" at self-care, with ~zero potential health issues) not an optimal reaction.

It's kinda like managing a lone bare-metal server - you need to find a low-overhead routine that keeps it reliably working. Not load it down with 5 different monitoring systems and the the fanciest server management software you can find and log pruning scripts running every 5 minutes and ...

Yep, your intuition does not fail you.

It's all marketing b*shit, before they were brainwhashing you into those 10 kinds of shampoo (despite they all being basically the same soap), now their marketing talent is focused on the new much more fuzzy and bigger area of "how to live right" sort of things.

Nobody knows what's best for you except you.

Self-care is a late-generation response to the effects of a work-focused/obsessed culture. The time-tracking/diet-watching/step-counting practices are the capitalistic response to people realizing they need to take care of themselves. It’s a feedback loop.

You can absolutely wake up and do whatever you want. The message you should take away from the self care movement is that your needs are important and you should address them.

That said, sooner or later you’ll hit the point where you realize you need to keep hydrated, be a little active, etc. You don’t need to track all that, but some people find it helps them keep it up.

It's not as complicated as you're making it out to be. You don't need to moisturize, meditate, or keep a journal.

If you work for someone else, you don't need to plan your day. Just show up for work. If you don't have any goals, you don't need plan for them.

The journaling and meditation stuff is mostly posturing. Most people who say they do those things don't actually do them.

I disagree with a lot of the sentiment in the comments on this post.

The reason these things are pushed are often because they help people in some form. Of course things are taking to the nth degree to make a quick buck manipulating people's fear response. But the core idea of looking after yourself (drinking water and moisturizing) is that you have one body/life, and you should cherish that to some degree.

At the end of the day, whatever works best for you, as long as you're not stepping on others.

Think of it as applying to a family member rather than yourself. Would you like your pet to eat well and drink enough water!

You're free to do what you want. Lemmy lived till his later 60s and Ozzy is even older. You can't do everything, but try and be kind to yourself, if you can.

I know you don't want it, but here my advice.

Get off social media, news, etc..

I largely stop using social media in its open form. I follow some creators and local shops, but I don't consume clips/tips/guidance anymore. I feel so much better than before.

OP: Why are you reading advertisements as admonishments? Ignore the adverts, problem solved.

The Psychology Industry takes good basic ideas from individual work and builds out Programs and Apps and Do's and Don'ts for mass audiences. Because it gets more clicks it connects with the self-critical parts of us that tell us we're not doing enough, or aren't good enough. Capitalism as a whole has a need to constantly reinforce those things, or else people won't buy more than they need.

The adage of "Don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from" is a pretty good one for filtering out all sorts of these things. Another is that "Comparison is the thief of joy."

In the west and especially in the US with our extreme sociosocietal independence it necessitates individual therapy to connect with our own needs, where in other places community and relationships would take its place. There's no easy pathways especially in this society towards self-contentment.

There's a simple solution - I don't do none of that stuff. Just go with the flow. It won't make you rich or successful, but it will definitely make you less anxious.

I bet most of those 100+ year old people didn't use apple watch and never cared about consuming this type of content.

Drinking water is good advice

Meditation is the biggest joke imo

you seen nothing yet...when your health starts failing all those complications suddenly become unavoidable and things only get worse

Difference being, now it's a chore (for many like OP); then it all starts failing, it becomes a necessity and focus. When your knee hurts 24/7, it's no longer a chore, it becomes your life to manage it. That's somehow far easier than chores.

How old are you?

I personally think it's garbage. You do you. Don't let others control you. However, do understand what you do has consequences. :)

Just do a pareto principle on it bro.

I don't do any of the things in your list, and it's completely normal not to. Some people like planning things, some like to feel productive so they come up with useless stuff to occupy them. Nobody has to do any of that if it doesn't help or if they don't want to.

Also, usually the corporate " practice self care" message means "we'll do nothing for you, and try and get you to blame yourself for any stress"

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