The Self-Care Industrial Complex Is Gaslighting Moms
I’m tired of being told I have to spend money I don’t have just to get some relief.
A $300 red light therapy mask so I look less bedraggled, a weekend-long reading retreat at an all-inclusive resort, a fitness wearable that tracks my sleep and gives me AI-generated insights on how to optimize it — as a mom, it feels like everything marketed to me acknowledges that I’m probably burnt out, before placing the responsibility for fixing it squarely on my shoulders. Didn’t we just establish that I’m f*cking exhausted?
The global wellness industry — which includes everything from personal care products to mental wellness tourism, like retreats — generated nearly $7 trillion in revenue in 2024. In Forbes, writer Maia Niguel Hoskin calls it “the rise of the relief economy,” and she makes a brutally real point:
“When a problem is systemic but experienced privately, the market fills the gap. The modern wellness and beauty industries don’t just sell appearance; they sell relief that women feel they can control. Because most working women cannot immediately change workload expectations, household responsibilities, or digital availability, treatments seem like the optimal cure, because they’re something most women can access and control.”
Her description rings incredibly true for mothers. We are expected to go to work each day as our best and brightest selves, come home and parent, be available for friends and family and our communities, work out, and keep a clean house, and that’s on a day when everything’s going right. What about when your kid is home sick and you need to make a doctor’s appointment? When you need to reassess your budget because you’ve been laid off and there’s no support coming? When another devastating news headline finally breaks you but your therapist has no openings ‘til next month, because everyone else is broken too?
Parents know all too well that systemic problems, like a lack of national parental leave policies and affordable childcare, are fertile breeding ground for consumer goods and services to pop up and swear they’ll make life easier — see baby chiropractors and sleep consultants, for example. It is reporting on these very subjects, and becoming a mom myself, that made me realize “self-care” as we understand it in popular culture is completely broken.
Of course we’re completely burnt out by the rising cost of living and stagnant rate of pay in this country, of watching families like ours get torn from each other’s arms and disappeared into vans to God knows where. So when I get an Instagram ad for some new mushroom-and-magnesium drink mix to promote better sleep, all I feel is rage. I don’t need nootropics, whatever they are, to feel less stressed — I need the price of ground beef to fall below double digits again. I need to stop seeing a clip of sick children in a family detention center before 9 a.m. and then dissociating in order to start work on time.
The problem with acknowledging that the self-care industry — with all its supplements and skincare — can’t fix our systemic, existential wearing-down is that we still feel its effects every day. We still feel the pinch of saving up our own sick days for when our kids have the flu, and we work through our own. We look at the December budget and decide which bill we can let lapse for a month to buy the Christmas present our kid wants most of all.
For me, self-care doesn’t mean buying sh*t anymore. It means realizing what these companies already know: that my attention and my money are a source of power. That’s why they want them so badly.
Moms control 85% of all household purchasing decisions and have trillions of dollars in spending potential. I can give it to remedying my dark circles, or I can squirrel the $40 I’d spend on eye cream into my savings account. The eye cream isn’t going to put more hours into my day for more sleep; it was never going to help anyway. I can spend my time trying to look younger against all odds, or I can do something that will take some friction out of my day, like laying out my clothes for the next morning so I’m not digging through hampers to find matching socks at 7 a.m.
While we vote like our quality of life depends on it — because it very much does — we just have to speak up when we can and wait for systemic change to lumber along. But while that’s happening way out there, right here in my day-to-day, I’m done being duped into thinking I can buy just the right thing and live just the right way to avoid feeling the world crumbling around me. If it shows in my crow’s feet and my gray hairs, so be it.
What actually feels like self-care is the literal act of caring for myself: cutting down my screen time like I’m a kid, eating more than enough, and saving my money instead of falling for the dopamine hit of purchasing new workout leggings.
I love a good skincare routine as much as the next girl — I’m just done falling for the idea that it’ll change anything about my mental state.
