Against the self-improvement industrial complex
Please don't make me work out.
When I interviewed the writer Xochitl Gonzalez for an article on wedding fragrances a while back, we were talking about the demise of the media industry, as one does, and she said something to the effect of, “I basically used to eat by going to magazine parties.” In media’s heyday, a perk of the job was you could count on your dining and drinking out being almost enitrely subsizdized by events and parties.
I’m no stranger to saying yes to a PR event for a free meal; particularly when I was living off of tenuous freelancing income, I’d love to see a dinner invite in my inbox1. But the kinds of tricks PR people are using to woo beauty and fashion writers and editors like me are changing: they’re not just offering us food and drink, they’re trying to get us to come work out. “Who doesn’t want a free workout class?” one publicist asked me in regards to such an offer. Me. I don’t want a workout class. This is my truth.
This is not a problem by any stretch of the word; considering the cost of gym memberships and fitness classes, a free workout class is objectively a nice gift (on the luxury end of things, which these offers are usually aspiring to, Equinox starts at roughly $300/month, a single reformer Pilates class in New York runs about $40). But I don’t want to use my precious time to go to a Barry’s HIIT class. I don’t want to get yelled at by Tracy Anderson and her abs. I don’t know when this became a luxury.
It’s mot merely working out. But any activity that connotes health, wellness, is the ultimate form of luxury. Drinking alcohol, partying, is now déclassé. The greatest aspiration of upwardly mobile young women is to stay home and do one’s self care. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake is in the way of self-improvement.
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Certainly some of this attitude is a holdover of 2020 when partying was, if not impossible, a moral and safety hazard. Not to mention the fact that Going Outside in 2025 is impossibly expensive for many young people. But this isn’t a new phenomenon for women’s self-worth and status to be tied up in devoting our every waking moment to bettering ourselves. I don’t know when this began, but it goes as far back as at least 2018 (which is so long ago this essay is no longer formatted correctly online), when Maris Kreizman wrote a BuzzFeed essay about the novels The Pisces and My Year of Rest and Relaxation as a scourge agaisnt the type of energy that drives women to Barry’s HIIT classes: the self-improvement industrial complex.
“While self-help and wellness culture may be a $3.7 trillion industry, the narrators of these books don’t buy the idea that it will save us. At a time when modern-day women are encouraged to use skin care as a coping mechanism, to do detoxes and cleanses, to cry at SoulCycle, that these characters choose such bizarre, disconcerting ways of coping is in itself a rebellious act.”
The self-destructive narrators of The Pisces and My Year of Rest and Relaxation were a reaction to girlboss-era 2010s feminism, which posited hard work and hustle as means to liberation. Today’s self-improvement industrial complex is still mostly targeted at upper-class white women like the 2010s girlbosses, but it has a slightly different look: it’s domestic rather than public, focused on personal wellness rather than professional gain. We are being encouraged to venture out only to work out, to otherwise stay home, do our skincare. And lately, to not drink alcohol.
I shout out alcohol not only as it is such a potent part of the social fabric, but also because women have historically been barred from drinking in bars and subsequently from participating in the public domain. And to be clear, there are upsides to the fact that more people are empowered to reject alcohol, and it’s potentially devastating mental and physical health impacts, as a social obligation. Big alcohol was never our friend, after all. But when we talk about trends we’re never speaking simply about individual choices and circumstances. As Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote in her op-ed on the recent popularity of Dry January: “Anything that becomes popular has politics.”
“A broader modern temperance movement promoting ‘clean’ living traffics in moral superiority and old racist ideas. That history is unavoidable, but today’s version of ‘the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine’ also reflects our self-defeating politics of individuality: Cutesy individual solutions cannot solve big social problems, like alcoholism or cancer.”
This obsession with working out and eating/drinking clean comes down to centering our own personal self-improvement as the great project of our lives, and the greatest moral good one can aspire to. You can’t possibly have the energy to care about macro social issues like abortion access if your schedule is packed to the brim with Pilates classes and meal prepping clean food.
I don’t say this to promote alcohol, but to question the idea that to indulge in anything that might be antithetical to productivity and absolute physical health is morally bad. Gary Shteyngart summed up this bent towards societal teetotalism perfectly in his New Yorker essay on New York City’s great martinis: “Modern Americans are supposed to submit to all the indignities of late capitalism: the endless work hours, the 9 P.M. e-mails from our superiors, software that monitors our every keystroke. And then we’re not even supposed to have a drink in the middle of this psychic carnage? (Perhaps that drink would interfere with our productivity.)”
I’m not all out anti-working out. There are fitness classes that talk about the health and politics of moving one’s body in a way that goes beyond “maximizing burn” and “toning.” I follow Pilates instructor Cadence Dubus for her perspective on health and fitness which has a sort of refreshing radical honesty: “You’re just not going to be skinny ever,” she said in one popular video.
But this sort of down-to-earth messaging is not often the kind of thing you hear in high-priced Manhattan fitness classes. And that I don’t find worth the burn.
For full disclosure, I drank a martini while writing most of this. It definitely made me write more slowly. And maybe a little worse. But it also made it more enjoyable.
When I was freelance writing full time, people would often ask me, “How do you live in New York as a freelancer?” The simple answer: I didn’t! I took every free meal I could get and I hoard samples in such a way that I haven’t paid for basic toiletries like shampoo and deodorant in years.