Why We Should End Self-Care And Embrace Hardship

How self-care is a warning that we are not living in accordance with nature

The Great Day of His Wrath. John Martin. 1853.

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I study pre-state modes of life to compare them to our own. We have much to feel good about when it comes to advances in technology, healthcare, and safety. But how much of the human experience has been lost?

If ever there were a modern concept that hints at a deep and pressing crisis of the soul, it is self-care. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, self-care means “taking the time to do things that help you live well and improve both your physical health and mental health.”

One way to practice self-care, we are told, is to buy things: cozy thermal socks, lipstick, sleep supplements, an eye “depuffing mask”, and cotton sweatpants. Or maybe pumpkin spice lattes. We might also catch up on TV and rewatch “a movie you’ve seen roughly 400,000 times.”

Let us play with this. What if we do maximal self-care? Does anyone believe all the sitting, lipstick, and sleep supplements on earth will cure the anxiety, depression, and meaninglessness at present? We survived an ice age without sweat pants and depuffing masks. Why, then, are they suddenly necessary for happiness?

So why are we not focusing on why we need self-care to begin with? My sense is that the cause is existential woe, which we can define as deep suffering relating to existence—a pervasive and ruinous sense of unease with life itself. I believe we should focus on why so many people in the modern world fall victim to this woe, for this is an opportunity to learn something crucial about what it means to be optimally human.

What did pre-state peoples who lived in accordance with nature do? Modern science confirms what those who have spent more than sixty seconds outside already knew: we are designed to carry weight for distance. It is becoming embarrassingly obvious that carrying excess body fat does not have the same effect as carrying rocks or logs.

Ancestral men carried their weapons and the animals they killed. And what of women? Soft, they were not. Among the Gikwe of Zimbabwe, women carried melons, roots, and children on their backs, shoulders, and arms for miles every day.¹ Among the Goilala of New Guinea, women carried one hundred plus pounds of nuts on their backs upon slick, steep slopes.² Among the Ayoreo of Bolivia, women carried large slabs of salt on top of their already heavy loads.³ Not only did these women not complain, but they beautified their suffering, sang cheerfully to each other, and were attuned to the trees, leaves, wind, birds, stars, and humans around them.

Let us play God for a minute. If we put the modern woman on a muddy hill with a sack of melons and happily chirping Gikwe women by her side, I imagine she would find the meaning of life on that rocky, rooty hill. If we picked a Gikwe woman off her mountain and dropped her in a living room, alone, with a few glowing screens and nothing to do—no sun on skin, no weight on back, no songs to sing, no calories to earn—she too may become miserable with her life, her luxuries, and her self. She too might order another pair of 100% Egyptian cotton sweatpants as if the life that plagues her depends on it.

I call these ancient stressors “ancestral hardship”, a concept woven through most of my essays. This hardship involves bonding through suffering, identity through common enemy, purpose through meaningful tasks, and command through muscles, lungs, and hearts put to the test. And we have the counter to ancestral hardship in the form of modern hardship: isolation through lack of enemy, voluntary self-slavery to possessions, an insidious sense of uselessness, madness through muscles, lungs, and hearts that have no idea what it means to be stressed, and attention ravaged by vibrations, emails, traffic, bills, and advertisements.

The crucial difference is that ancestral hardship is brought on by hardship and modern hardship by ease.

My strong feeling is that our pre-state brothers and sisters did not need self-care because they did not suffer from existential woe, and they did not suffer from existential woe because they endured ancestral hardship. If so, then self-care is only needed in the absence of ancient forms of daily hardship.

So, why does existential woe exist? In a word, ease. This is a disease for which we have no inborn defense.

I look at it this way. We have been given an immune system to fight off pathogens after they enter our body. We have also been given a behavioral immune system to fight off pathogens before they enter our body, like when we gag at the smell of moldy milk which keeps us from drinking it. But nature did not give us what I think of as a Hardship Immune System (HIS).

Why might this be? My sense is that we never had it easy for long enough to develop defenses against the diseases of ease. Actually, we are wired to seek ease because it was so rare. Our hypothetical HIS does not say “Careful—ease will allow you to make yourself obese and suffer a heart attack. Careful—ease will allow you to lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling in depression and anxiety, biting your fingernails in terror of existence as opposed to gratitude for surviving one more cycle of sun and moon.”

It seems we have three choices. We can wait until we evolve a HIS in the next couple thousand years. We can continue to watch in horror as an apocalypse unfolds of depuffing masks, sweatpants, and soliloquies on TikTok of how wretched life is. Or we can propose a cure and invent a Hardship Immune System.

The problem is culture; a culture of ease that has forgotten who and what we are; a culture obsessed with “mental health” governed by those who may be themselves of questionable mental health. This may be why “experts” are advocating for greater ease when ease itself is the problem.

I am obsessed with a paradox—in removing the burden of nature, we brought on the burden of freedom from nature. Without a “must” in the form of a gnawing hunger or an enemy war cry, it seems isolation, depression, anxiety, and a crisis of mental health can fill this Void. This paradox is worth obsessing about because it is an opportunity for self-creation—for merging the best of ancient truths with modern comforts.

What then? According to Apollodorus, Sisyphus was a king sentenced by Zeus to roll a rock over a hill with his hands and shoulders, but every time he groaned and bloodied his hands and knees rolling the rock to the top, it would roll back down the hill. Self-care advocates would look at this hardship and think that Sisyphus’s punishment was a punishment.

Since we do not have an immunological reaction to ease, why not make a prohibition against it?

Let us institute a Law of Sisyphus.

What might Sisyphus say if he could see what existence has become for so many?

Ease is a disease. You think this is a punishment, Zeus? What you consider a punishment—hardship—I now freely choose as a way of life. What is a couch when I have a hill? What is a latte when I have water? What use is a television when I have made friends with myself through suffering? What do I care for thermal socks when I have not submersed myself in thirty-five degree water beforehand? What is the value of comfort without first knowing discomfort? What is a liquid crystal display compared to sweating beneath a blood-red sunrise when all others are still swaddled in blankets? What better self-care exists than a bit of sun on my skin?

Grunting and glorying in lactic acid?

Carrying melons and children instead of fat and phones?

Spending more time with apes of flesh and blood instead of screens of glass and ads?

Why not, then, merge the ancient with the modern and practice a savage pleasure in adversity?

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What then? is a passion project.

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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.

1. Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall. The Harmless People. Rev. ed., 2nd Vintage Books ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1989.

2. Hallpike, C. R. (Christopher Robert). Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains: The Generation of Conflict in Tauade Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977

3. Bugos, Paul Emery. 1985. An Evolutionary Ecological Analyses of the Social Organization of the Ayoreo of the Northern Gran Chaco. Doctoral Dissertation, Northwestern University.