Has Self-Care Become a Way to Opt Out of Community?

There is a phrase that has, in the last decade, completed an extraordinary linguistic journey. Self-care, which Audre Lorde first used in 1988 to describe the political necessity of survival for Black women under conditions of systemic harm, has become — by some estimates — a $1.8 trillion global wellness economy. Bath salts. Therapy apps. Boundary-setting workshops. Sleep tracking. Skincare regimens. Journaling subscriptions. Crystals. Sound baths. Solo retreats. Five different planners marketed to help you protect your peace.

The transformation is not, by itself, a scandal. People genuinely benefit from rest. People genuinely benefit from boundaries. People genuinely benefit from therapy, from sleep, from skincare, from journaling. The wellness economy is not, in any simple sense, a fraud.

But there is a question that has been quietly accumulating, and we want to ask it: has self-care, in its current cultural form, become a way to opt out of community?

The question is not whether self-care is good. It is whether the version of self-care most heavily marketed to us — solo, purchased, optimized, performed on social media, increasingly indistinguishable from a personal brand — is doing the work it claims to do, or whether it is doing different work that we have not been honest about.

A necessary infrastructure according to the professionals

Mental health professionals tend to defend the basic premise of self-care without much hesitation. Their argument is straightforward and supported by clinical literature: humans operating under chronic stress without recovery time develop predictable adverse outcomes. Cortisol dysregulation, sleep disruption, immune system suppression, depression, anxiety, burnout. The intervention — take care of yourself — is not optional. It is the floor below which functioning collapses.

People who hold this view tend to argue that the cultural mockery of self-care reflects an older, more punishing work ethic that has produced a generation of burned-out adults who would not have burned out if they had been given permission, vocabulary, and tools for rest earlier. The boundaries movement, the therapy-going-mainstream movement, the no is a complete sentence movement — all of these, in this framing, are corrections, not indulgences.

The strongest version of this argument is this: in a culture that demands constant availability, constant productivity, and constant emotional labor, the act of carving out time and space for one's own recovery is itself a political act. Refusing to be infinitely consumable is a refusal that the culture punishes, which is why the people who do it most visibly are often punished most visibly.

This is the position you will hear from clinicians, from many therapists, and from a meaningful share of the wellness industry's better-faith voices.

Self-care as a weapon

A second perspective comes from social philosophers and cultural critics who have been writing about the wellness economy for the last several years. Their argument is more pointed.

The argument runs roughly: self-care as Lorde meant it was inseparable from political work. The phrase appears in A Burst of Light, the essay collection in which Lorde was processing her cancer diagnosis and her continued political activism. The self-care she was describing was the maintenance work that allowed Black women to keep showing up for each other and for collective struggle. It was because of the community work that the self-care was necessary. The two were not opposed. They were the same project.

What has happened, in this critique, is that capitalism encountered Lorde's framing and stripped out everything that made it political. Self-care became a marketing category. It became indistinguishable from luxury consumption. It became an individual obligation rather than a communal practice. It became, in the most cutting version of this critique, a way of training people to address structural exhaustion — produced by economic precarity, by inadequate childcare, by stagnant wages, by the breakdown of community infrastructure — through individual purchases that leave the structures intact.

People who hold this view often point to the evidence that loneliness, isolation, and social disconnection have been increasing in measurable ways across the same period that the self-care economy has been growing. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. Robert Putnam's foundational Bowling Alone documentation of declining civic and community participation has been re-confirmed by every survey since. Americans have fewer close friends than they did 30 years ago, attend fewer organized communal events, and spend fewer hours in face-to-face interaction with people outside their household.

If self-care were the answer to chronic stress, we should be seeing improving mental health outcomes. Instead, depression, anxiety, and loneliness have been climbing in lockstep with the wellness industry's revenue.

Beyond ones and zeros, it's still binary

There's the argument that self-care versus community is a false dichotomy, and that the people drawing the dichotomy are usually doing so for ideological reasons that have less to do with helping anyone and more to do with positioning themselves against either capitalism or against the therapy generation depending on which side they are on.

In this view, real human beings move between solitude and community continuously. A person who takes a long walk alone, comes home, and then has dinner with their family is not opting out of community. They are doing what humans have always done, which is rotating between modes of presence. The internet has made the solo modes more visible — Instagram posts of the bath setup, the journal page, the morning routine — while the communal modes have always been less photogenic and therefore underrepresented in the cultural feed.

People who emphasize this perspective tend to argue that the answer is not to abandon self-care, nor to romanticize community as a corrective, but to recognize that healthy adults need both, in proportions that vary by life circumstance, and that any cultural narrative that pits one against the other is producing a false choice.

A case for intentional self-design

Less commercially visible but worth including in the conversation, another perspective comes from a strain of contemporary thinking that asks whether the issue is not self-care versus community at all, but rather core-aligned self-care versus performative self-care. In this framing — which echoes some older traditions of contemplative practice as well as more recent intentional-self-design models like the AndeCore framework — the question is not how much time you spend alone versus with others, but whether the practices you call self-care are actually reconnecting you to a sense of authentic core or whether they have become a substitute for the harder work of figuring out who you actually are.

The argument runs that performative self-care — the kind that gets photographed, optimized, scheduled, and posted — can become its own form of avoidance. The bath, the candle, the journal, the playlist, the boundaries can all be doing real work, or they can be functioning as a sophisticated diversion from the deeper questions about purpose, alignment, and connection that the practitioner does not yet have answers to. In this framing, self-care that is genuinely restorative will tend to increase a person's capacity for community over time, because the rest is rebuilding the self that shows up to others. Self-care that is functioning as avoidance will tend to decrease that capacity, because the rest is building a more elaborate fortress.

This is not a settled position. It is one perspective among several. But it is worth naming because it points at a question the louder critiques of self-care often miss: not is self-care good or bad, but is the particular practice in front of you doing the work you think it is doing.

Time for an Honest Audit

We are not going to land a take. We will say what the question asks of you, the reader: an honest audit.

The audit is this. The next time you do something you call self-care — the bath, the cancellation, the early bedtime, the boundary-setting, the solo retreat, the protective scheduling, the morning routine, the wellness app subscription — sit with the question for a minute before doing it. Is this practice rebuilding my capacity to show up for the people I love? Or is it functioning, in this case, as a way to not show up at all?

The honest answer will be different on different days, for different practices, for different people. There is no universal verdict. The point is not to feel guilty about self-care. The point is to be honest with yourself about what self-care, in your particular life, is actually accomplishing.

If it is rebuilding capacity, keep going.

If it is replacing community, that is information worth having.

Views worth considering.

Sources

1. Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light: Essays (1988). The original text introducing self-care as political necessity.
2. U.S. Surgeon General. "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation." Advisory, May 2023.
3. Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) and subsequent updates.
4. Global Wellness Institute. Wellness economy reports, 2024–2026. https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/
5. American Psychological Association. Stress in America surveys, 2020–2025.
6. Nakate, Sara. "How Self-Care Got Hijacked." The Atlantic, March 2024.
7. Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger (2023) — on the wellness-to-influence pipeline.
8. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental health and depression surveillance reports.