The Problem With Treating Self-Care as Consumption

This essay is about what that bottle has watched happen to the word self-care. By self-care as consumption I mean the version of care that arrives priced: the mist, the candle, the subscription, the retreat booked to recover from the job that paid for the retreat. The World Health Organization still defines self-care clinically, as the ability of individuals, families and communities to promote health and cope with illness with or without the support of a health worker. The market defines it as a wellness economy worth $5.6 trillion. The distance between those two sentences is my subject, and it is not an abstract distance for a household that moved countries. We already own a working archive of care that was never bought, and the exchange rate keeps doing the comparison for us.

Where the word came from

Self-care started as a clinical term. It is currently a retail category. The WHO’s definition keeps the word in the world of health systems — what a person does for their own health between and around the professionals — and the organization has spent years folding self-management into its guidance, on the sensible ground that most care happens where the clinic is not. The other root is Audre Lorde, who wrote in A Burst of Light, in 1988, in the journals she kept with cancer:

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

She meant survival infrastructure for people whose survival was not a priority of the state. The sentence has since been printed on mugs, face-mask packaging and subscription boxes, which is a long trip for one sentence: from a journal kept during chemotherapy to a checkout page, in about thirty years.

Between the clinic and the journal on one side and the checkout page on the other, the market noticed something true and sold something else. The true thing: adults are tired, under-slept, and managing stress badly. The American Psychological Association has been running its Stress in America survey since 2007, and respondents keep reporting that they could be doing more about their own stress. The something else: a product category whose main instruction is buy, and whose secondary instruction, printed in smaller type, is buy again next month. The Global Wellness Institute measured the wellness economy at $5.6 trillion in 2022 and projects $8.5 trillion by 2027. Wellness is a wider word than self-care — it counts tourism, real estate, food — but the growth is fed by the same small ritual: a tired person, a shelf, a card.

What the golab cost

In 2017 the bottle cost eighty thousand tomans, which the free-market rate that week put at roughly twenty-six Canadian dollars. In the spring of 1403 a cousin texted the going rate for the same litre from the same distillery: one million two hundred thousand tomans. In tomans, the golab had become fifteen times more expensive in seven years. In dollars it cost roughly what it cost before. The currency had done the arithmetic; nobody had to.

Closer to where I live, the comparison is easier to run. A grocery on Lonsdale Avenue sells golab from Qamsar in 750-millilitre bottles at $14.99, hand-taped label, Persian-only. At a beauty counter on Robson Street a frosted 30-millilitre mist — rose, the label says — costs $42. That is two cents a millilitre on Lonsdale and a dollar forty on Robson. Per millilitre, the mist costs seventy times what the golab costs, and the mist is mostly water.

I do not think the people pricing the mist are thieves. The mist is paying for a counter, a brand, a promise, and a form of permission: the permission to stop, briefly, which in this city is sold by the unit. What stays with me is that the permission is priced and the golab never was. In Qamsar nobody sold me permission. They sold me a litre of something and tape for the cap, and the stopping was included — in the queue, in the smell of the gargar, in the three weeks the gol-e mohammadi gives the town and the town gives back.

Care was administered

In 1374 the hammam two lanes from my grandmother’s house charged two hundred tomans at the door. You brought your own lenger and your own kiseh, and the dayeh worked your back in a way that was not negotiated in advance. Nobody called it self-care. It was Thursday, and this is what happened on Thursday.

Golab, in that house, was administered like a medication. A headache got golab on the temples and the lights off. A child running a fever got it on the wrists. Eyes that had been crying got the cold of it, carefully, at the corner. An aunt who thought you looked pale had other instruments, but golab was the one you could ask for. The dose was free, the labour was somebody’s — usually my mother’s — and the whole pharmacopoeia fit on one shelf.

I do not want to romanticize the administered version, because it charged its own currency. Care that comes from people arrives with commentary, with obligation, with a ledger nobody wrote down and everybody remembers. The consumer version solves that: it is care with no questions, no commentary, and no one to disappoint. It is also, for the same reason, care that cannot notice you. On the worst week I have had in this country, the candle did not once ask how I was.

The subscription, and the transfer that came back

For three years I paid an app $89.99 a year to breathe with. The app was good. It rang a small bell at nine each morning and told me I deserved rest, and it meant it, in the way a direct debit means anything. In March 2023, on the same day the annual fee came out, a transfer I had sent to Tehran came back to my account with a one-line reason that contained no reason. I sat with both receipts open for a while. One company had charged me to be told to rest. The other had returned money without explanation and closed the ticket. I cancelled the app, not out of principle exactly. The two receipts were simply clearer together than either was alone.

What I kept, without noticing I had kept it, was the breathing. The app had taught me a ten-minute practice and then gone on charging for the memory of having taught it. This is the mechanism of self-care as consumption, stated plainly: the product is the delivery system, and after the delivery the product continues to bill. A candle does not teach anything. A $42 mist does not teach anything. The subscription taught me something and then billed me annually for the privilege of remembering it.

When buying care is still care

The problem is not the purchase. A therapist on West Broadway charges $180 a session and it is the cheapest money I spend. Orthotics are care. Blackout curtains for a shift worker are care. The filling a dentist put in my lower-left molar last February, which no one has photographed for anything, is the most successful act of self-care I have performed this year. A purchase is honest when it buys a change in what the body does after the receipt. It is something else when it buys only a change in what the shelf says about you. The shelf is not the body.

What I do now, itemized

1. The receipt test. Before I buy anything marketed as care, I ask what it will ask of me after I own it. If the answer is nothing — if it only sits there being owned — it is decoration. Decoration is allowed. It just isn’t care.
2. The millilitre test. Divide before buying. The Robson mist is a dollar forty a millilitre; the Lonsdale bottle is two cents. Sometimes the expensive one is still the right one. But the division should happen at the kitchen table, not at the counter.
3. The administered hour. Once a week, care is a person, not a purchase. Sunday, eight at night, which is morning in Kashan. The call costs nothing but the hour, and the hour is the point.
4. The boring clinical kind. Bloodwork. The prescription taken as written. The form filed. The WHO definition includes self-management with or without a health worker, and the unphotogenic half of that sentence does most of the actual work.

What is left in the bottle

There is about a third of the 2017 litre left. It has crossed two borders and three apartments, and it sits now on a shelf between a sunscreen and a candle bought in a bad week of 2021 and never lit. I use the golab the way it was first used on me: temples, wrists, the corner of an eye that has been crying. The bottle is eight years old. At the rate we use it, it will outlast every subscription I have cancelled.

This is the fourth essay in an ongoing series in which I follow one object, document or ritual until it explains something an argument could not. Next month: the queue outside the embassy in Ottawa, from 6:40 in the morning, in February. If your household kept caring with a particular thing — a thermos, a lenger, a jar with a taped lid — write to me and I will follow it. The best objects arrive from readers, carrying dates.

Questions I am asked about self-care and money

Is buying something for yourself ever real self-care?

Yes, when the purchase changes what your body does after the receipt. Therapy, orthotics, a mattress for a bad back, the taxi home after a long shift — these act on you repeatedly, whether or not they photograph well. The test is not the price. It is whether the object asks anything of you once you own it. If it only sits there being owned, it is decoration. Decoration is fine. Calling it care is where the substitution starts.

What did Audre Lorde actually mean by self-care?

She meant survival. The sentence — “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” — comes from A Burst of Light, the journals she kept after a cancer diagnosis in the 1980s. Lorde was writing about a person whose continued existence was treated as optional by the institutions around her, and about the labour of staying alive anyway. The mug keeps the sentence and drops the cost of it. That is the whole history of the word in one object.

How large is the self-care industry, really?

The category is hard to measure, because wellness is an elastic word. The Global Wellness Institute put the global wellness economy at $5.6 trillion in 2022 and projects $8.5 trillion by 2027; that figure counts tourism, real estate and food, not only face mists. The narrower market — supplements, skincare, sleep aids, apps — is smaller and still enormous, and different research houses slice it differently. The elasticity itself is the finding: a word wide enough to cover a meditation app and a hot-spring resort can cover almost anything a tired person might buy.

How can I tell the difference between care and consumption?

Three questions. What does it ask of me after I buy it? Who administers it — a person, a practice, or nothing? And where does it live: in my week, or only in my cart? The golab fails none of these. It asks to be poured, it is administered by whoever is nearest, and it lives on the corner of an eye that has been crying. The candle I never lit failed all three, and I keep it anyway, as evidence.