The United States is no stranger to self-improvement, from the meditation and essential oils of the 60s to the Jane Fonda aerobics tapes of the 1980s and the fat-free-everything 1990s. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841, sounding a bit like a modern SoulCycle instructor. From these deep roots, the $11 billion self-improvement industry has grown.
How Self-Care Became So Much Work
What do we lose when we track, monitor, and assess our leisure?
August 10, 2018
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Summary.
Today, like so much around us, the $11 billion self-care industry is heavily influenced by tech. Our focus is shifting away from the actual self — our bodies, minds, and spirits — and toward data about the self. With iEverythings around us at all times, we expect our steps to be enumerated, our REM cycles to be recorded, and our breathing patterns to be measured. It’s not enough to just feel better — we need our devices to affirm that we are doing the work. This raises the question: Are we genuinely interested in feeling healthier and happier? It seems likely that the values driving us to be workaholics in the first place are also encouraging us to “optimize” ourselves by using metric-driven “hacks.” We may idealize the actions we are able document and share, or the data we can collect and track, but there are plenty of times when what we need to do to feel better — and actually get better — is do less.