The world stopped caring and called it progress
The world stopped caring and called it progress
A client sat across from me last week and told me she didn't understand why she was so tired.
She listed it out. The supplements. The therapy. The early nights. The boundaries she'd worked hard to set. The morning routine. The journalling.
Then she said, "Why doesn't any of it work?"
I sat with that for a long time after she left.
Because the honest answer isn't one she wanted to hear, and it isn't one most of us want to hear. It's not that she's doing care wrong. It's that she's been handed a version of care that was never going to hold her, in a culture that stopped knowing how to care a long time ago.
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from living in a world that doesn't value care. Not burnout, exactly. Something older. A kind of grief for something lost so gradually, so quietly, that most of us didn't notice until we were already running on empty.
In my work, I sit with people who are exhausted in ways sleep doesn't fix. And what I've come to know is this: the exhaustion didn't begin with you. It's inherited. Carried in nervous systems that have been trying to do too much, with too little support, for a very long time.
Here's the part that's worth knowing, even though it won't make you feel better straight away.
For most of human history, care wasn't gendered the way we understand it now. In many pre-industrial and Indigenous cultures, tending the sick, the young, the dying, the community and the land was simply part of being human.
Everyone participated in some form. Everyone had to because we needed each other to survive.
Then things shifted. As industrialisation pulled men into factories and formal employment, the home became a separate sphere, and everything inside it became "women's work".
Birth, feeding, emotional labour, raising children, caring for elders. Not because women were naturally suited to these things, but because someone had to do them, and women were being pushed out of economic life.
Once care was coded as women's work, it inherited all the ways women were already being diminished. It became soft. Unskilled. Natural rather than learned. Something anyone could do, which in practice meant something no one needed to value or pay for.
Then care got a price tag. The move toward institutional care – paid aged care, childcare, disability support – wasn't without benefit. For many people, it filled real gaps. But commercialised care brought a quiet distortion with it. Care you pay for became more legitimate than care you simply give.
Tending got a dollar value, and anything that couldn't be invoiced slipped further from view.
And when women moved into paid work across the 20th century, a hard-won expansion of freedom, care didn't get redistributed. It got quietly left behind. The cultural conversation moved on without ever asking who was doing the tending now.
The answer, mostly, was each of us. Alone. In private. With less and less of the communal scaffolding that used to make it possible.
So when you find yourself doing everything right and still ending the week depleted, this is the context you're inside. You're not a person who's bad at self-care. You're a person carrying the load of what was once a community effort, in a culture that stripped care of its value and asked you to make up the difference, independently.
That's not a failure.
And yet, and this is the part I keep coming back to, care never fully disappeared. It went underground. It survived in the people who kept passing practices between generations. In communities that kept gathering, grieving and celebrating despite every structural pressure.
In the mutual aid networks, the elders, the circles of people who kept showing up for each other without payment or recognition. Often the people doing this work were the ones with the least.
Care has always had its keepers.
And something is shifting now. There's a growing hunger, not for self-care as a commodity, but for real care as a practice. People are exhausted by the simulation of care and starving for the real thing.
That hunger isn't weakness. It's the body remembering what it always knew.
The client I mentioned at the start. We didn't add anything to her list. We took things off. We started talking about what she actually felt when she did the morning routine, and whether any of it was reaching her.
It wasn't, mostly. Because care that's performed alone, against the grain of a culture that doesn't support it, rarely lands.
The work is smaller and slower than we've been told. It's having honest conversations about how care got lost. It's practising the skills of care in small groups and communities.
It's letting tiny drops of care ripple through the parts of life where we can actually feel them.
That's where I'm putting my attention these days. Not because it's the answer to everything.
But because it's what care actually looks like once you stop trying to perform it for someone’s judgment.
Melting into Comfort is a free audio and email series I created for exactly this. A small, quiet place to begin practising what real care actually feels like — in your body, not just in theory.
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