Bubble Baths and Bondage Will Not Set You Free

It’s been a long week. You’re stressed, you’re tired, you’re feeling the creeping tendrils of burnout. What’s the solution? The modern world has a ready-made, beautifully packaged, and highly Instagrammable answer:

✨self-care✨

The prescription is familiar. Run a hot bath with an expensive bath bomb. Light a scented candle that costs as much as a good bottle of wine. Slather on a luxurious face mask. Do some yoga. Meditate with a mindfulness app. Journal your gratitude. Pour a glass of rosé. Post a picture of your perfectly arranged self-care ritual with the hashtag #selfcare. You are tending to your needs. You are prioritizing your well-being. You are taking back your power.

The global wellness industry, now worth trillions of dollars, has successfully sold us this vision of self-care as a radical, almost political act of self-preservation. In a world that demands so much of us, carving out time for ourselves feels like a quiet rebellion. The mantra, often attributed to writer Audre Lorde, echoes in our minds: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

But is it? Is your $40 face serum a tool of liberation? Or is it something else entirely? As we immerse ourselves in the commercialized rituals of wellness, it's worth asking a more critical question: Is the modern "self-care" movement actually setting us free, or is it a cleverly disguised, gilded cage? To untangle this, we need the fiercely brilliant mind of one of the 20th century’s most important philosophers and foundational feminists: Simone de Beauvoir.

Meet Simone de Beauvoir. An intellectual giant of existentialism alongside her partner Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir’s monumental 1949 work, The Second Sex, single-handedly laid the groundwork for modern feminism. She was a thinker who refused to accept the world as it was, relentlessly dissecting the hidden social, political, and economic structures that conspire to limit human freedom—particularly the freedom of women.

De Beauvoir would not be impressed by your bubble bath. In fact, she would likely see the modern self-care movement not as a form of liberation, but as a perfect, insidious example of what she identified as one of the most powerful traps set for women: immanence.

The Cage of Immanence vs. the Freedom of Transcendence

To understand de Beauvoir's critique, we first need to grasp two key existentialist concepts she used to frame human existence: immanence and transcendence.

For de Beauvoir, every human being (or "subject") has a fundamental drive toward transcendence. This is our desire to reach beyond our current situation, to create, to act upon the world, to have projects, to shape our own future, and to find meaning through our engagement with the universe. It is the active, creative, and outward-facing aspect of our existence. It is the part of us that writes novels, builds bridges, starts revolutions, and explores the stars.

Immanence, on the other hand, is the opposite. It is the passive, static, inward-facing state of being. It is being stuck in the repetitive, biological cycles of life—maintenance, consumption, and mere existence. It is being an object in the world, rather than an actor. While everyone experiences moments of immanence (we all have to eat, sleep, and do laundry), de Beauvoir argued that society has systematically pushed women into a state of perpetual immanence, while reserving the world of transcendence for men.

Historically, man was defined as the Self, the active Subject who gets to go out and make his mark on the world. Woman was defined as the Other, an object whose primary role was to maintain the domestic sphere—to cook, clean, and raise children—so that the man could be free to pursue his transcendent projects. She was trapped in the endless, repetitive cycle of maintaining life, while he was free to give life meaning. Her existence was defined by her body, her home, her appearance. Her job was to be, while his was to do. This, for de Beauvoir, was the central injustice of women’s oppression: the denial of their fundamental human drive for transcendence.

Self-Care: The New Immanence?

Now, let's look at the modern self-care movement through this lens. What is it, really? Overwhelmingly, it is a set of activities focused on the self, the body, and the home. It is about maintenance.

The goal of a face mask is not to change the world, but to improve your skin. The goal of a bubble bath is not to launch a project, but to soothe your tired body. The goal of a gratitude journal is to adjust your internal perspective, not to challenge the external conditions making you unhappy. These are all acts of immanence. They are activities designed to help you better endure your situation, not to transcend it.

De Beauvoir would argue that the wellness industry has brilliantly co-opted the language of feminist liberation ("reclaiming your time," "empowerment") and used it to sell women a more luxurious form of their traditional cage. It keeps women occupied with the endless project of working on themselves—optimizing their bodies, their minds, and their homes. It tells them that the path to happiness is not through external action, but through internal maintenance and personal consumption.

The problem, from a Beauvoirian perspective, is not that taking a bath is bad. The problem is when the bath is sold as a substitute for political action. The movement tells you that if you're feeling burned out by an unjust economic system, the solution is not to organize for better working conditions, but to buy a more expensive candle. If you're feeling oppressed by patriarchal beauty standards, the solution is not to dismantle them, but to buy the skincare products that help you better conform to them.

It takes a collective, political problem and reframes it as a personal, individual failing. And the solution is always, conveniently, something you can buy. It is the logic of immanence, supercharged by capitalism.

The Narcissist and The Woman in Love

De Beauvoir identified two common traps that women fall into to cope with their confinement to immanence. The first is The Narcissist, who, denied the ability to act upon the world, turns her own body and self into her primary project. She obsesses over her beauty, her clothes, her home, making herself into a beautiful object to be admired. The second is The Woman in Love, who tries to live vicariously through a man, making his transcendent projects her own.

The self-care industry masterfully appeals to a modern version of The Narcissist. It encourages us to make our own well-being our ultimate project. It creates a bubble where the most important work we can do is on ourselves. It’s a subtle but powerful depoliticizing force. It keeps us so busy optimizing our own lives that we have no energy left to engage with the messy, difficult work of changing the world for everyone.

Beyond the Bath Bomb

Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy is a cold, bracing splash of water in the face of the warm, comforting bath of commercialized self-care. She reminds us that true freedom—true transcendence—is not found in perfecting the self, but in forgetting the self through engagement with the world. It is found in creating, in building, in learning, in connecting, and in fighting for a more just society.

This doesn't mean you have to throw away your scented candles. It means we must be fiercely critical of what they represent. We must learn to distinguish between genuine, necessary acts of rest and recuperation, and the seductive, depoliticizing trap of "wellness" as a consumer lifestyle. Rest is essential for the fight; it is the act of recharging so you can return to your transcendent projects. The trap is when the recharging becomes the project itself.

So, by all means, take the bath. But as you do, ask yourself the questions de Beauvoir would want you to ask. Is this act of "self-care" helping me to better endure an unjust system, or is it refueling me to go out and challenge that system? Is this a moment of rest, or is it a distraction? Is this helping me on my path to transcendence, or is it just making my immanence a little more comfortable?

The ultimate act of self-care, she might argue, is not a face mask. It is the messy, difficult, and profoundly human work of building a world where we all have the freedom to transcend.