Self-Care is an Illusion

What to do after buying yourself flowers

“All that is solid melts into air.”
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Earlier this winter, at a farewell party for my dear friends Z and Z, I found myself in one of those quasi-facilitated conversation circles that seem to spring up like fairy rings in the wake of the post-therapy intelligentsia. The question was, Are you happy in this period of your life? And if not, when were you the happiest? It was a wonderful party question — open enough to allow for evasion, but direct enough to make a case for vulnerability. For the most part, my interlocutors were tender and thoughtful, leaning into their wrists on the couch, eyes rolling up in deep consideration.

Some reported — in chirpy tones — that they were, in fact, thriving. This was met with a series of muttered encouragements — Girl, that’s so great! Yas! etc. etc. Some others confided that they had been feeling unsettled lately, citing a series of life disjunctures: fresh apartments, breakups, new jobs. After these admissions a different set of murmurs flowed, low and sympathetic. I sat there immersed in the stories until the circle turned to me.

It turned out that this question was a very difficult question to answer. I opened my mouth, then closed it. I’m not that happy, I began, but. Given this time in my life, I think I have something that’s more important to me than happiness. I struggled to put this thing into words. Embeddedness, maybe? Or, rather… I feel very interested in my life. I find my life very interesting. I feel like an animal in the forest, with all of her feet on the ground. I have many things to grip onto, and I have things I want to do. I feel deeply involved in my life. I am invested in it. I do not want my life to end.

Painting by Max Seckel.

If we think of the opposite of happiness as sadness, we can sometimes conflate the apex of sadness with its close counterpart, the desire to die. Very sad people often do not want to live. But, these feelings are in fact separate. One can be very interested in one’s life and still be extraordinarily sad — if, say, one observes one’s sadness the way one observes the weather. I feel devastated today. I wonder what will happen to this feeling tomorrow?

On the other hand, in the most difficult periods of my life, I can recall many peak experiences — happiness! pleasure! the feeling of being in Yosemite and looking at many bright yellow flowers — but these were accompanied by a pervading sense of disinterest throughout, a feeling that I had somehow accomplished my earthly mandate and that my return to non-existence was rather overdue. To borrow a hypothetical scenario from Nietzsche: if a demon were to have appeared at my bed and told me that I was destined to die immediately, there were entire periods of my life when I might have said, with an air of resignation, even gentle finality, ah, that makes sense. Go ahead, take me then.¹ I was often happy, but rather disinterested. I was like an animal in freefall, or perhaps floating in space — unconnected to a sense of forward momentum, devoid of plot and its vivifying machines.

At this party, I realized that I finally felt the opposite: that my life, difficult as it sometimes was, had somehow become extraordinarily interesting to me. Somewhere, in the day-to-day shuttling from task to task, in the crooked vagaries of healing from heartbreak, in the recurring lonelinesses and the endless little tests of living, I had found a sense of absorption. If the demon were to have appeared to me now, in my new state, I would have cried out in protest — but there are so many things I wanted to see happen! So many things I wanted to finish doing!

Since the party and since this moment, I have come to feel that this — whatever this is, this sense of interest or absorption in one’s own life, of gripping life fully and not wanting to let go — is in some sense a measure of health more faithful than one’s overall sense of happiness. I daresay, it might even be better than happiness.

Gustav Klimt, “Attersee.” 1900.

What is this thing, then, that is not quite happiness? To begin, I might attempt to distinguish it from happiness by saying that to me, happiness is an emotion, and one closely allied with pleasure. One feels happy for various reasons, from the most deeply rooted (a graduation party) to the most serendipitous (it’s a beautiful day and a butterfly just flew by). One might measure one’s overall sense of happiness in any given period, then, by counting up the positive experiences and their intensity; a particularly lucky period might yield a great deal of happiness, then, or a period of reaping many rewards well-earned.

On the other hand, this sense of interest or absorption is not quite as linear. If anything, it many even be a measure of the density of one’s earthly commitments — how deeply one feels needed on earth, how invested one is in various projects, friendships, political movements, romances, families, teams and treasured corpuses of work. I don’t want to die because… the local baker will miss me, and my workout class will wonder where I went, and my brother will need a soccer coach, and my mother and father will be devastated, and who will finish writing my book, and who will water my flowers? One can be miserable, and yet deeply embedded in a network in which one is constantly giving and taking, a node whose presence shapes the entire invisible architecture. There is a social gravity to this kind of life, a richness that cannot be fully read in any single moment. It is not an emotion, not a single state; it is more like a kind of flourishing that can only happen over time, and in concert with the flourishing of others.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to feel that this social richness — some might simply call it “meaning” — is more than enough to satisfy me, and that the pursuit of happiness has become more and more irrelevant.

Illustration by Alexis Beauclair.

Perhaps I am feeling particularly motivated to articulate the difference between happiness and meaning at a moment when self-care and self-love has yet again strummed its nerve in our collective cultural body — this time, through the inescapable Miley Cyrus pop hit, “Flowers.”² Cyrus croons, in the long aftermath of her brief marriage to Liam Hemsworth:

I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours
Say things you don’t understand

I can take myself dancing
And I can hold my own hand
Yeah I can love me better than you can

The music video — which was released less than two weeks ago and already has over one hundred million views — is a curious case study in what is so often meant by the word “self-love”: the rendering of the body as a perfect product, and the raising of one’s own value in the market of love. After all, Miley’s self-love anthem isn’t accompanied by a video of her snuggling under a duvet for a nap or eating a favourite dessert. It’s literally accompanied by a workout and a crazed moonlit dance in an expensive suit. This post-divorce anthem is about mastery — over her own body, and in the broader world of commerce and commercial success. Loneliness and regret have been swept aside and replaced with the dubious balm of being able to afford expensive things — and, perhaps even more holistically, just being an expensive person.

And in the age of the “old money” Tiktok trend — wherein young people analyze exactly how to dress and talk and act like one comes from “old money” — it stirs the heart to consider the many ways in which we are all hoping that being expensive will ease the aches of the heart.

Miley’s proclamations — about being able to love herself better than any husband ever could — rest on the idea that there are few meaningful differences between the relationships we have with others and the relationship we have with ourselves. The only sphere where this might even remotely be true is the sphere of the market, wherein anyone’s money can buy you flowers. And in keeping with this, she has created a video in which she has retreated into the power of her own money, so to speak, perfecting the product of her body through exercise, flaunting the gains of her workout routine, removed and cloistered from friends, community, society as a product is on the shelf. She has retreated in order to assure herself of her value; she is beginning, again, to make deposits into the investment account of the self.

Illustration by Kentaro Okawara.

I know there are some, at this point, who might challenge how seriously I am taking this music video — but I do think we ought to take pop culture seriously, not only because I am a Comparative Literature wing-nut who was raised in the age of cultural studies (!) but because in our hyper-speed world, we are increasingly outsourcing the work of emotional processing, meaning-making and narrativizing to other people. This means that Miley’s narrative of heartbreak has a rather peculiar social function at this moment in time: it has become an off-the-shelf narrative for many others who are seeking a song, a film, or an essay to tell them how to feel. To get a sense of this, one merely has to glance at the comment’s section of the video, which is full of comments like this:

Instead of sitting with our own emotions, then, and letting a narrative emerge that suits us, we increasingly have no choice but to turn to popular media to give us mooring for our experience. And Miley’s song is definitely fulfilling that function for others who are going through heartbreak, recovery or just a period of singledom. So the question is: does it work? Can we really love ourselves better than other people can?

Hair by Zia Byrd.

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure that we can. I say this as a late-twenties woman who has been re-adjusting to singlehood, and as someone whose great narrative in the past half-year has been irrevocably defined by heartbreak and loss. I have bought myself flowers and held my own hand; I have re-invested in myself through fashion, exercise, mindfulness, etc. These are wonderful processes but what they produce is a temporary burst of good feeling: happiness. But what has truly nurtured me in this time is other people — and being inured to them, being loyal to them, and being required by them. The richness of which I spoke has been the real treasure of my heartbreak. And I worry that in our fetishization of the self, of the endless grind for beauty, status, glamour, we take solitude and we run in the absolute opposite direction: towards more solitude, albeit looking extremely hot.

I can understand why, on a systemic level, this has a tendency to happen. The structures and flows of capital are built such that at any given moment, we are incentivizing teams of strangers to sell us the idea that purchase behaviours will cure heartbreak — and that bettering yourself is the answer to loneliness. In the long-term, in other words, Miley’s narrative is excellent for GDP. (Imagine every single person after a breakup in 2023, buying passes to Barry’s and expensive bouquets… would this be the economic resuscitation we’ve been waiting for?!)³ But the idea that we simply do not need other people is utterly corrosive to meaning. It is a dangerous idea, pervasive because it is lucrative. And I worry that our collective investment in this narrative is contributing to the loss of other ways of being — more interconnected, interdependent ways — that are beginning to sound mythic, even like reliquaries of an extinct and backwards past.

Gertie Huddleston, “Dusk at Ngukurr.” 1977.

I want to be clear about one thing, and it is this: I recognize the value of what is being sold here. In fact, after my own breakup I did have my own moments of ecstatic solitude, of suddenly realizing I was capable and free. I don’t think this narrative is in any way a fabrication — I literally did dance alone, even cried incredulous and blissful tears that seemed to overflow from nowhere, unwitnessed and unexplained. I am not opposed to this hurrah! But I’ve come to see that those moments were merely a part of the long process of grief — and specifically, for me at least, only part of the beginning.⁴ And we are witnessing the consequences of the fact that the beginning part of this process is indeed the most marketable — and, buoyed by our own desire to believe, we have continued to repeat the narrative that this is how a breakup feels: triumphant and self-actualizing, a paean to selfhood. This has not been my total experience. Indeed, nothing was to rescue me from the hours spent curled up on the couch later on: the wondering, and the retro-active imagining. The feeling dissolving as heat dissolves on a winter evening: slowly, accompanied by shivers, a vague trace of steam in the air. The tears and the turning. These needed their place. I would have been ill-served to be stuck at the beginning.

So I do want to say to you, wherever you are in your journey, whether or not you are in a process of grief: I hope your happinesses are durable, and that the pleasures you grant yourself shine a true light on your life. But if they do not, and you find that inevitably, the pleasure ends, my real hope is that in the quiet moments you do not hide, but attempt to rejoin yourself to the great whirling everything that is this human collective. Please, allow yourself to be useful and allow others to be useful to you. Use and be used. Go on. It’s not going to hurt you.

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If you liked this essay, you might enjoy reading this essay on the dangers of independence, this one about desire, and this one about anthropocentrism. As always, the full archive is here.

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Discussion Questions

Feel free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, or with other readers in the comments.

1. Do you practice self-care? If so, how would you define self-care?

2. Are you happy right now in life? Do you feel invested in your life right now? How are these the same? How are these different?

3. List out your duties — to others and the world. Looking at this list, what do you think? Would you like to be more or less needed by the world?
   

1. To be clear, I am borrowing from Nietzsche’s famous parable of eternal recurrence. In this parable, he asks the reader to imagine a demon appearing by the bed with the following forecast: you are doomed, from here on out, to live your life over and over, exactly as it has been — every emotion and every event, every heartbreak and every ecstasy — for the rest of eternity. Nietzsche then asks: how would you react? Would you collapse in horror or cry out with gratitude? He implies (but does not state directly) that we ought to use such a metric to measure our way of living — whether we are truly living into the greatness that is available to us.

Said in other words: if you wouldn’t be grateful to live your current life over and over, what would you have to change?

2. Would it be a Sundogg essay if I didn’t take the lyrics of a pop hit extremely seriously?

But also, here’s the music video.

3. What’s more, for my readers more interested in quantitative analysis and the ways it affects institution action: happiness is also more readily visible and conveyable than meaning, making it something we can track both for ourselves and others — in an expression, in biometric data or in simple “affect analysis.” An approximation of happiness can be derived more or less from a block of text; meaning unfolds over time and is difficult, if not impossible, to capture in a single instance.

To complicate this even further: if we take any single slice of time and search for “meaning,” we might notice that the local artifacts left behind by meaning are in fact emotionally negative! For example, my husband asked me to run back to the grocery store and get milk! UGH! But on the global level, the profusion of many such relationships of duty and necessity create a sense of a life-well-lived.

Thus, we might say that meaning is often felt as a series of obligations, each of which appears as a challenge to individual freedom but in aggregate, become the very tether that binds one to one’s own life.

4. The happiness immediately after a breakup might even be understood as the sudden energetic burst of a chemical bond breaking… the energetic artifact of a state change.

As Marx predicted of the centuries to come, speaking of modernity and its tendency to abstraction: “all that is solid melts into air.”

How much of the cultural energy we are feeling is coming from breaking things that cannot be put back together? Relationships, traditions and old ritual ways of being — laws and their spirit? Are we due for a cultural heat death on the other side?