I catch myself scrolling at odd hours between laundry and pretending to cook and there’s always someone on my feed saying, with a sunlit smile, “Love yourself first.”
It’s framed like advice, like a small act that will rearrange your whole life if you just do it right. The words sit beside a sponsored post selling a weekend retreat.
I don’t want to sound cynical for the sake of it. There’s something generous in the idea of teaching people to be kinder to themselves.
I’ve heard those refrains pick up people out of dark days. But there’s also a split I can’t shake.
The person who posts the affirmation and the person whose life is being monetized by that same message aren’t always the same person. Or at least, not in the way we imagine.
The camera wants a tidy narrative (growth, confidence) and the market rewards tidy narratives. Sell the vibe, sign the deal. Self-love is a hell of a good copy.
On one hand, speaking positively to an audience is low-friction. We call it brand-friendly.
On the other hand, practicing self-love, really practicing it, can be awkward and slow.
It can mean saying no, setting boundaries, sitting with boredom or grief. Those things don’t fit neatly into a thirty-second reel or a before-and-after carousel.
It’s a bit like learning to resist pressure in other parts of life, whether from sales pitches or bold claims, an approach I explored more in the practice of asking better questions instead of rushing to agreement.
If this feels like the kind of space you want more of, you’re welcome here.
I think about how that frames the person scrolling, the average Joe, with a job that doesn’t come with a highlight reel, who knows what a full bank account feels like only through the sheen of someone else’s sponsored smile.
If self-love is mostly presented as a set of aesthetics and short mantras, then it how is it different than any another commodity?
Go ahead and buy the tote and enroll in the course. Purchase a product and feel proactive. For many of us, that’s just fine. For others, it’s a shallow balm.
Once, the language of meaning and consolation was held broadly by churches, unions, local communities, aunts and mentors. You learned as much about how to live from games and stories around the fire as from a sermon.
Now, the language of consolation has been privatized and optimized with therapists on podcasts and gurus with newsletters. The frames have changed and so have the units of exchange. Where you used to belong to a collective story, now you’re invited to practice an individual story. Every day, for a fee or a product.
I don’t mean to say social media optimism is entirely hollow. It can be a ladder, sometimes the only one someone can climb.
It can be a voice that saved a day or a life. And I don’t have a neat solution for how one gets from the cheap comfort of a slogan to the slow work of real care; either for others or for ourselves.
What interests me is that this goes beyond influencer culture. The same logic of saying the right thing, making it pretty and then monetizing the longing, shows up in politics and in our workplaces.
I find myself wondering not just whether influencers practice what they preach, but what it means that preaching has been packaged into a product.
Does it change what we hunger for? Does it change how we find it? It seems worth asking what are we buying when we buy self-love, and what, if anything, are we letting go of in the process?