The great feminist thinker and poet Audre Lorde once said, self-care “is not self-indulgence—it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” This statement remains just as true today, if not more so. Income inequality has only grown. Job stability is increasingly precarious. In fact, actual jobs are increasingly difficult to come by– we are increasingly reliant on short-term, part-time gigs, working as independent contractors  or contingent workers with no benefits and no security. I am a millennial, and my generation in particular is famously financially screwed. Much ink has been spilled over the issue.

Part of the zeitgeist of my generation is a constant existential dread– a suffocating panic threatening to close in on us. It’s not hard to see why. 1 in 5 millennials live in poverty. Many of us will never own homes. We are burdened by exponentially more student debt than our parents with far worse job prospects through no fault of our own. We were simply unlucky enough to have graduated during the worst economic crisis in recent memory, and we face the scariest financial future since the people who lived through the Great Depression. This is all real.

Continue reading “Self-Care Alone Won’t Save Us” →