The wellness industry is quiet lately.
The products are still moving, the influencers are still posting. But the brands that spent years telling you that a better serum or a more optimized morning routine could fix what’s broken in your life have very little to say right now about what’s actually happening in the world. That’s not an accident, and it’s not apolitical. It’s a business model.
The wellness industry was not built to make you more powerful. It was built to keep you focused inward, on yourself, on your personal optimization, while everything happening around you continued without your interference. And to understand how we got here, you have to go back to where self-care actually started, because it didn’t start with face masks and meditation apps.
Before it became a $1.7 trillion industry, self-care was a medical concept. Doctors encouraged patients, particularly elderly people and those managing mental illness, to take an active role in their own health and recovery. It was practical and unglamorous. Then the Civil Rights Movement transformed it into something political. The Black Panthers opened free health clinics and free breakfast programs in Black communities as a direct act of defiance against a system that was deliberately letting those communities go without. Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins practiced yoga and meditation not as a lifestyle choice but as a way of sustaining themselves through incarceration and an ongoing fight for justice. Rosa Parks used yoga for resilience, not to look better, but to stay strong enough to keep going.
Self-care in that context was community care. It was about keeping the fighters capable of fighting. It was inseparable from the resistance itself.
By the late 1970s, wellness had entered the mainstream, and that political dimension got quietly stripped away. The concept turned inward, then turned into a product, and eventually became something that works best when it keeps you absorbed in yourself. A population focused entirely on personal wellness tends not to ask hard questions about the systems making them unwell in the first place.
Two Things Being Said Right Now That Both Get It Wrong
Two things are being said right now about how to exist in this moment, and both of them will take you out of the game if you let them.
One says you should pour everything into the fight. Burn bright, sacrifice sleep, health, connection, joy, because anything less means you don’t care enough. This produces people who burn out within months, too depleted to think clearly or sustain anything long-term.
The other says to protect your peace. Unplug, unfollow, step away from anything that raises your heart rate. This produces people who have disengaged so completely that someone else is making every decision that affects their lives and their children’s lives, without them in the room.
A friend recently acknowledged me by saying, “Disengaging might feel like peace, but it usually just means someone else gets to make the decisions for you. History doesn’t move because people stayed comfortable. It moves because people were willing to stay awake, ask questions, and hold onto both their humanity and their convictions at the same time.”
This is what neither of those two stories will admit. You don’t have to choose between caring for yourself and showing up for the world. That choice is something you were sold. The real work is learning to hold both with equal intention, at the same time.
Every Resistance That Lasted Understood This
The movements that lasted didn’t glorify exhaustion, and they didn’t encourage retreat. They understood that keeping the fighters whole was part of the strategy.
The French Resistance operated in small cells that protected each other as fiercely as they protected the mission. They rotated responsibility, fed each other, kept each other human, because a depleted operative makes mistakes and mistakes get people killed. Care was not separate from the work. It was part of it.
SNCC organizers during the Civil Rights Movement were trained not just in tactics but in emotional endurance. How to absorb violence without being broken by it. How to return to your community after trauma and come back with something still intact. Fannie Lou Hamer sang before marches, not as a performance, but as a way of coming back to herself so she could give fully to what came next.
The pattern shows up even in the stories we tell ourselves about resistance. Luke Skywalker went to Dagobah to get stronger so he could return and face the Empire, not to find peace and stay there. Katniss Everdeen didn’t use her trauma as a reason to opt out. She let it clarify exactly what was at stake. Frodo kept walking, not because he felt capable, but because the people around him gave him just enough to continue. The fellowship wasn’t incidental to the mission. It was what made the mission survivable.
Renewal in service of a return. You rest so you can come back. You heal so you can hold the line. You take care of yourself so you remain capable of taking care of what matters beyond yourself.
Why Both Matter Right Now
Audre Lorde wrote that self-care is “an act of political warfare,” and people quote that line constantly without the context. She was a Black woman with cancer, fighting for her life and for her people at the same time, refusing to let either battle erase the other. It wasn’t permission to step away. It was a refusal to be consumed by the system or by the resistance to it. She would remain whole, because only whole people can sustain a revolution over time.
Another friend said something to me that I think of often now, “Your fierceness comes from an intense love for the oppressed. If everyone loved all people the way you do, America wouldn’t be crumbling before our eyes.”
That word, love, matters here. It connects the personal to the political in a way that neither burnout culture nor wellness culture will allow for. The loudest voices calling for justice right now aren’t doing it out of hatred. They’re doing it because they care about their families, their communities, the future their children are going to live in. Anger rooted in love sustains differently than anger rooted in nothing. It gives you a reason to take care of yourself, because the people and the future you love need you here and functional and clear-eyed next year, and the year after that.
What Holding Both Looks Like
Staying informed while setting the terms of your own engagement means you decide when and how you take in the news, so it stays active and intentional rather than a passive flood that leaves you too overwhelmed to act on anything. Doom-scrolling at midnight doesn’t make you more committed. It makes you more anxious, and anxious people don’t strategize well.
Taking care of your body, sleep, movement, and food isn’t about aesthetics or wellness trends. Your body is the vehicle you’re using to show up. When it’s running on empty, your thinking gets cloudy, your patience disappears, and your ability to be present for anyone else collapses.
Letting yourself feel what’s real, in safe spaces with people who can hold it with you, matters because grief and anger and fear are information. They tell you what you value and what’s worth fighting for. The goal isn’t to manage those feelings away. It’s to feel them fully enough that they point you toward action rather than paralysis.
And protecting the people who sustain you, the ones who see you clearly, tell you the truth, and call you back to yourself when you’ve drifted, is not separate from the resistance. That circle is the foundation of it. Self-care was community care before it was anything else, and that origin is still the truest version of it.
We Are Doing This For Something Real
That same friend reminded me of something I needed to hear: “The world needs you. Our children need you, especially right now.”
The decisions being made right now, the systems being defended or dismantled, the futures being written or foreclosed, our children will live inside those outcomes. They will inherit whatever we build or whatever we let go of because we were too exhausted or too checked out to hold on.
Renewal matters because burned-out people cannot protect anyone’s future. Resistance matters because comfortable people will not. Both are necessary, not as a balance to achieve once and maintain perfectly, but as an ongoing practice you return to and recalibrate for as long as this requires.
Another friend said, “Compassion and resistance aren’t opposites. The most powerful resistance I’ve ever seen has always come from people who lead with empathy.”
I want to add something here from my own experience, because I think it matters. I have spent twenty-seven years working in service industries, restaurants, retail, fitness, and leading teams from the front line all the way to executive levels. I have managed hundreds of people over that time, and a significant number of them have been young people. I say this with genuine love for that generation, because I have watched what the wellness industry’s messaging has done to some of them up close.
A portion of the young people I have led over the years have internalized self-care in a way that quietly became self-preservation at the expense of everything else. Not because they are lazy or indifferent, but because they grew up inside a culture that told them discomfort is always a red flag, that their peace is the highest priority, and that anything demanding too much of them is a threat to their well-being. And through that lens, some of them have opted out of the very experiences, challenges, and responsibilities that would have made them stronger, more capable, and more able to contribute to something beyond themselves.
What they missed, and what that messaging never told them, is that some discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that you are growing. That you are showing up for something that requires more than what is easy. That you are building the kind of capacity that self-care, in its truest form, is actually meant to protect.
Real renewal is what makes you capable of carrying something. It is not a replacement for carrying it.
So rest. Feel the grief without drowning in it. Stay angry about what deserves your anger without letting it consume the person you are underneath it. Take care of yourself the way the people who came before us took care of themselves, not as an escape from the fight, but because the fight needed them alive and capable and still themselves.
And then come back. For yourself, for each other, and for the children who are watching us figure out who we’re going to be in this moment.
