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; a serum, a course, a weekend retreat. The pairing feels less like coincidence and more like an economy at work.
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, redemption, confidence) and the market rewards tidy narratives. Say it enough, sell the vibe, sign the deal. Self-love is a hell of a good copy.
That doesn’t mean the sentiment is false. It just makes me wonder about practice versus performance. On one hand, speaking positively to an audience is low-friction; it’s brand-friendly; it scales. On the other hand, practicing self-love—really practicing it—can be awkward, slow, expensive in ways that don’t translate to likes. 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.
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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 becomes another commodity. Go ahead and buy the tote and enroll in the course. You can picture it as therapeutic capitalism, feelings packaged with a return policy. It’s effective because it promises relief without demanding much. You can press like and feel a little less alone. You can purchase a product and feel proactive. For many of us, that’s just fine. For others, it’s a shallow balm.
There’s a cultural shift here that interests me more than my own suspicion. 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.
That may explain a hunger I notice in people, a spiritual itch that calls itself “self-improvement.” When you scroll, it’s easy to mistake the appetite for more posts or more strategies. But sometimes I wonder if what’s being fed is just the surface of something deeper; an ache for significance, for being seen don’t necessarily sell well as single buys. Maybe people are reaching for transcendence but are nudged, again and again, toward techniques that are visible and sharable; affirmations, “self-care” rituals, glow-ups. The framing nudges the hunger into consumer shape.
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. I only notice the pattern: a phrase that soothes us, a product that monetizes the phrase, and a life where the two overlap in ways that feel, at times, uncomfortably thin.
What interests me is that this probably matters beyond influencer culture. The same logic—say the right thing, make it pretty, monetize the longing—shows up in politics, in our workplaces, in how we talk about faith, even in subtler places like how people learn to trust a number once it has a story they can stand inside of. If the currency of consolation becomes performative positivity, what’s lost are the awkward, granular practices that actually build resilience. If God, or the Universe, or simply the silence between people is part of what we used to turn to, then those things don’t monetize so easily. They don’t lend themselves to reels.
So I keep scrolling, sometimes hopeful, sometimes wary, and sometimes laughing at my own gullibility. I find myself wondering not just whether influencers practice what they preach, but what it means that preaching has become a product. Does it change what we hunger for? Does it change how we find it? Either way, 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?
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