The Big Business of Self-Care

Or why your goals of self-care never seem to work out.

Self-care and mental health has been a hot topic in recent years and every once in a while you’ll see a social media post of people asking why they can’t seem to find enough time in the day to achieve all their self-care goals, eat healthy, exercise, and go to work and do it all while still sleeping. This isn’t a bug in the people making the right moves to take care of themselves, its due to the way our working lives are structured. For most people, their lives are structured around their job. It is where they spend most of their time and everything else becomes secondary to that. The reason that you can’t seem to do it all? Capitalism.

We Work Too Many Hours

The sheer amount of hours most people spend at work or getting ready to work or even driving to work adds up to a majority of most people’s day. Consider this: the average commute is 47 minutes in the United States. If someone has to start working at 8:30 A.M. that means that they must leave their home no later than 7:40. Supposing that they need 30 minutes to wake-up, eat, dress, and possibly shower, this person has to wake up at by 7:00 at the very latest. If the person has children that need to be dropped off at school and gotten ready, they are rising at 6:00 AM. This is not time that is free to take care of personal needs. This is merely the essential tasks to get ready for work themselves and get their children to school. This person’s day has essentially begun at 6:00 AM. The working day will end at 5:00 P.M. with 30 minutes for lunch. Then the person must drive home and attend to any tasks along the way. Getting home by 6:30 or 7 is normal. Then, the worker has 3 short hours to prepare a meal, rest, relax, attend to personal needs and then sleep again. This is supposing someone only works 40 hours a week. The reality is that most people work at least 47 hours a week (if not more) and this means that an additional 7 hours of time can be added to the schedule listed above. It might seem normal but the reality is that the majority of the day for most people is consumed with tasks related to work. From getting ready to work, commuting to and from, most of the day is spent on tasks related to work. Work is an outsized portion of our lives.

Work and Self-Care

There is little time for real self-care in this schedule that most people keep for 5 days a week. It is so exhausting that the first non-working day is usually spent resting and relaxing from all the working days. Service workers will often have split days off which means that the worker will have a day to rest and relax, be called on to work again and then have another day of rest. All other personal concerns including doctor’s appointments, tests, and self-care must generally take place within 48 hours either on the weekend or during days off. It’s very hard to pull off. Preparing meals takes time, so does exercise or other things for health and wellness. Cleaning up the home takes time as well. When people complain that there just aren’t enough hours in the day, they aren’t wrong. They aren’t enough hours in the day. As commutes stretch longer and working hours stretch longer the time to properly take care of personal matters or explore yourself and your needs diminishes. For those with mental health issues where flexibility in work to better manage stress is essential, the regular working life can be more crushing than other people.

One of the biggest areas of self-care is taking time away from stress to recharge and do things that are pleasurable and enjoyable. This can take a variety of forms including hobbies, meditation, exercise, spending time with friends and family, or consuming media. Even just attending to the needs of life can be time-consuming the time to do it is just as impacted by the outsized time most people spend working.

Self-care shouldn’t be limited to taking care of yourself, though. Helping others is often the best way to help ourselves. Philanthropic actions deliver a huge sense of self-satisfaction, underling your value to the world. It can start with supporting friends and family in daily life. Alternatively, joining charitable initiatives like Clermont Lions Club helps you make a difference. The positivity given to others is contagious and is certain to enhance your quality of life. If you are working in a job that leaves you questioning your contribution to society, this type of self-care is key. Not least because it can bring added structure and balance to your world.

Every working person needs a wife

People have no shortage of things to do in their personal lives. This was highlighted in a recent article about a German tech company. This company reduced their workweek to 25 hours and found that employees spent so much time and energy on their outside lives that their passion for working diminished. The article portrayed this as a bad thing. The reality is that work was put in its proper place in the lives of the workers: a secondary area of life. For too long, work has been the primary focus of life. What companies are discovering is that when working hours go down, employees are happier because they actually have time to have a life outside of work. In my recent podcast episode, The 4 Day Work Week, we explored the changes employers are seeing when they reduce working hours. The improvements are profound and immediate.

Before women joined the workforce, workers were primarily male who had wives at home to attend to a variety of personal needs like laundry, food preparation, and shopping. Now that the stay-at-home wife is becoming scarce, more people are both working and trying to attend to these needs as well as perform work with the hours that it entails. Work and personal needs just don’t balance out very well because work takes up so much extra time. My Nana has an old adage: every working person needs a wife.

We as a society have chosen to create food delivery services, fast food, laundry services, and other services to fill the labor that used to be performed by women staying at home. Everyone needs these things done and instead of making the smart decision by reducing working hours and adjusting start times, we instead have created new businesses around catering to people who have no time to attend to their own needs. The solution isn’t a new app or service. It is simply to work less and focus on the actual business of life which is far more than gainful employment.

Yet Self-Care is Bigger Than Ever

Self-Care is the self-help of the 2010s. In the 1990s, everyone was reading self-help books and trying to fix their lives. Now, it’s self-care. Relaxing, travel, taking trips, and constantly finding new foods, activities and products for self-care has become a popular thing to do. It’s a trend that is going nowhere fast. Although it has become a business, it stems out of the modern trend of addressing mental health and realizing that within the system we currently live, actual people, are at a disadvantage and the only way to make sure people don’t kill themselves is to take better care of themselves. Where society has failed, individuals must step in to fill the void. This is one such area. Self-care products, services, and Instagram posts cover over the real problem. This is another area where people have real feelings. They have a real need and capitalism has stepped in to provide new products and services to fill the need without really solving the problem.

From time to time, someone will post on reddit or twitter asking how people can sleep, keep their house clean, see their friends, and work full-time. Everyone offers some version of what they do to keep it all balanced like hiring a cleaner or sending the laundry out. But the reality is that no one can really keep it all in balance and work at the levels we do. The system has been designed that way. The modern employment system serves the needs of capital above all and problems like self-care simply don’t register. Productivity is higher than ever before and has been rising since the end of World War II and yet working hours have not moved since 40 became the standard preceding the war. We are doing more with less people and those people are working longer hours. Who does this serve? A system of capital that uses this system of labor to keep labor costs down and profits. Self-care of employees just isn’t that profitable. Unless they kill themselves. That’s always bad for the bottom line.