Our Infatuation with Self Optimisation Could Be Dividing Us More

Words: Madelynne Flack

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Many of us have fallen victim to the unavoidable presence of the wellness industry over the past few years. It feels like we’re the prey of its constant pursuit, as it chases us into lonely corners of the internet, filled with neurotic beauty routines and audacious “health experts”. In its latest guise, however, this pursuit of ‘wellness’ has surpassed the superficial and bled its way into the way we form relationships.

It can, of course, be tiresome trying to look after yourself while you’re navigating a career, love-life and the pulverising existentialism of your 20s. But recently, it’s as if we’ve become so focused on the pursuit of our own self-optimisation that we’re reluctant to put sufficient effort into, well, anything apart from ourselves. As a 22-year-old woman, I've noticed this phenomenon taking shape in the lives of some of my closest friends, with many of them actually rejecting romance, sex and intimacy in order to “protect their peace.” 

The constraints of late capitalism mean “we’re poor in both time and money,” says journalist and writer Sophie K Rosa. Making it a struggle for us to separate the emotional value of relationships from their productivity value. Rather than creating space in our lives for emotional risk, we’re only favouring things with transactional promise. “We live in a society that encourages us to self-optimise. Other people can be inconvenienced by that.”

Although Sophie does think “we do need to have a certain self-regard,” the Radical Intimacy author “can’t resonate with the idea that we have to profoundly and completely love ourselves first”. She continues: “I don’t think that is a realistic picture of how the human psyche operates.”
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The naked truth is that no-one seems to want to put effort into anything anymore. If a friendship requires a difficult conversation, we’re spurred to cut it off; likewise in romantic relationships and even in work. The concept of inconvenience is simply too much for us to consider. 

“I’ve been cut off by my friends before,” says Mia, a 23-year-old professional living in Oslo, Norway. “They wrote me out of their life and hid the reason why, because they didn’t want to confront me. I only realised what had happened when my other friends let slip that I’d offended her with something I said –  but I had no idea!” 

“It is intimacy that Gen Z are leaving behind. This can be seen in the sex recession that’s swept over us in recent years.”

According to psychologists, cutting people out of your life can actually do you more harm than good, and put you at risk of broken or superficial relationships. Lois, a 27-year-old medical student from Newcastle, UK agrees. “I’ve had a good friend of mine cut me off because I voiced that something she’d done had upset me

“She completely blew up about it, making me feel like I was in the wrong for wanting to talk. To me those things really stick with you. I have to build up the courage to mention something to my friends now. You should be able to talk to them if they’ve hurt your feelings and, in turn, they should respond by acknowledging your feelings.”

“Everyone has different needs,” adds Mia. “If we stop being able to stretch ourselves to understand things we haven’t experienced then we’re losing empathy.”

While it’s not new to suggest that collective pandemic trauma or lack of socialisation could be feeding our hyper-individualistic behaviours, it is intimacy that Gen Z are leaving behind. This can be seen in the sex recession that’s swept over us in recent years. In 2023, Google Trends data indicated a 90% increase in searches for celibacy in the UK alone, with more young people exploring celibacy than ever before, as a way of prioritising their physical and mental wellbeing. 

That’s not the case for Olivia, though. The 24-year-old studio assistant, also from Newcastle, believes “you don’t learn anything” when you deny yourself experiences.“I sometimes get scared of the pain I've felt before, but [sex and] dating is fun, it’s an opportunity to meet someone new, explore someone else’s perspective and to get to know yourself better. 

“I’ve missed out on opportunities before because of this. Straight out of University, I was so burnt out and had been given an offer for my dream internship. Ultimately, I turned it down in the name of recovering and ‘protecting myself’. I valued my peace over the opportunity. I still think about whether or not it was the right thing to do,” she continued. 
In Hatred of Sex (2022), authors Oliver Davis and Tim Dean argue that it’s our fear of discomfort that makes us reluctant to engage in these intimate relationships. The authors, who are two queer men themselves, suggest that this threat of deeper emotional connection can feel daunting in the mainstream sphere of love, sex and relationships; but it’s those in marginalised communities, and particularly queer people, who are predominantly affected. The commercialisation of sexuality has made it increasingly challenging for people within queer communities to form intimate relationships, spurring those who don’t want to conform to a commodified image of ‘queerness’ to reject intimacy altogether.                                                                                             

Although conversations around queer discourse are more prevalent, “they’re also more widely critiqued,” says Sophie. Forcing people who exist in these spaces to negotiate between their sexual freedom and the commodification of their sexual identity. “It’s very much a norm born out of a heteronormative culture. We value being in a romantic couple as the ultimate achievement, instead of fulfilling relationships,” she continued.

Ultimately, self-care is important, when practiced within reason. But, unless we reject some of its more individualistic examples, we risk forgoing intimacy for, as Sophie puts it, a “dystopian existence of atomisation”.