A Laurie Penny For Your Thoughts

The provocative writer offers an indictment of “self-care” in late Capitalism

The erudite, biting but always funny and thought-provoking Laurie Penny argues for the Baffler that the Western emphasis on personal wellbeing cannot be taken out of its corrupt context. Indeed, she writes, “the wellbeing ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease.”

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless

The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives. …

We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. …

Anxious millennials now seem to have a choice between desperate narcissism and crushing misery. Which is better?

She calls the emphasis on individual well-being belief “isolating” and suggests that the way society foists it on us is a kind of “abuse and gas-lighting.” Moreover, it limits us: “it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice.”

And don’t even get her started on YOGA. Actually I’m kidding, Laurie Penny writing about yoga is a treat.

I’ve been doing yoga for two years and it’s changed my life to an extent that I almost resent. I have trained myself, through dedicated practice on and off the mat, to find enough inner strength not to burst out laughing when the instructor ends the class by declaring “let the light in me honor the light in you.” The instructor is a very nice person who smiles all the time like a drunk kindergarten teacher and could probably kill me with her abs alone, so I have refrained from informing her that the light in me is sometimes a government building on fire.

Downward-facing dog is not a radical position. Nonetheless, that particular asana is among a few small concessions I make to self-care while I wait for the end of patriarchy and the destruction of the money system.

Overall, the piece reminds me of the delightful write-up by Malcolm Harris of Katrine Marcal’s delightful-sounding, capitalism-eviscerating book (reviewed for this site by Nicole Dieker here), Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? Marcal takes down traditional, individualist economic theory (“Once he pulls himself out of the womb by his bootstraps, the imagined economic individual wants one thing: more”), and Harris’s only argument with it is that she doesn’t push it to what he considers to be the natural endpoint: revolution.

RELATED: Laurie Penny on sex work, which she has objects to only inasmuch as she objects to work in general.

Let’s not abolish sex work. Let’s abolish all work

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