PicoBlog

A new term has been popping up a lot in the self-care lexicon lately: soft life. Oddly enough, as much as I critique the archetype of the StrongBlackWoman, there’s something about this “soft life” idea that made me bristle from the moment I encountered it. Maybe it’s because I usually encountered it in the form of social media posts about financial privilege, marrying for money, and toxic femininity. In one post, a Black man suggested books for women to help them access “soft life femininity,” including Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. In essence, the soft life seems to be oriented toward middle and upper-class White women.

This, though, is not how it started. According to a few articles I’ve read, the term was coined in the Nigerian influencer community in early 2022 as a pushback against the ideology of the StrongBlackWoman, which is especially toxic when combined with the hustle culture predominant among millennials and Gen Z. The soft life was supposed to be an antidote to Black women’s tendencies to push ourselves to exhaustion (and early death) in the service of other people and institutions. It encouraged Black women to form lives around comfort, ease, and joy.

For some women, that has simply meant taking time for themselves, maintaining boundaries around work and relationships, and learning to rest. I applaud all of that. But the trend has seemed to take a toxic turn, one in which softness requires embodying a form of femininity fixated on physical appearance and romantic relationships. At an extreme, people are encouraged to cut relationships with anyone who makes them feel bad. I won’t even go into how White influencers are now capitalizing on the term and making it all about financial privilege.

I think this was inevitable because of how it was originally framed, that is, as a life without stress. The aim of the soft life is to be stress-free, to live without friction. But that’s an impossible goal. Stress is a natural and normal part of life for all creatures. Psychologists generally define stress as any demand or change that requires a response from us. And stress isn’t necessarily bad. Some stress, called eustress, is adaptive, motivating us to engage in behaviors that we need for survival. Survival on earth requires a lot of work, even with the benefits of modern technology. Someone has to farm and grocery shop so that we have food. Someone has to build homes for us to live in, and someone has to supply them with the materials that they need to do it. But stress isn’t just about survival. It also motivates us to engage in activities that are challenging and rewarding. Athletes routinely use stress to improve their performance.

When stress exceeds our capacity cope and becomes overwhelming, we become distressed. That’s when we have a problem and when stress can negatively impact our health and well-being. As long as suffering, illness, and death are part of human life, distress is also unavoidable. The tragedy of our world is that some of us suffer extra distress because of racism, sexism, xenophobia, heterosexism, trans hostility, ableism, and so on.

This is what the soft life was intended to address. It was supposed to provide relief for the heavy lifting that Black women do. Unfortunately, it erred in failing to distinguish between eustress and distress, in seeing all stress as something to be eradicated in the pursuit of ease and even laziness. Too often, it views the pursuit of financial privilege through romantic affiliation with wealthy men as the avenue to this ease. And it is mistaken in its assumption that the opposite of stress is ease, when it’s really apathy.

But more importantly, if we are living without any stress, it usually means that someone else is being exploited for the sake of our ease. That’s what often happens to Black women. Around the world, our labor is often exploited to make life for other people easier. We cannot fix the problem by becoming part of it. For, as Audre Lorde taught us, “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.”

Join me and my friend Dr. Tiffany Stubbs as we lead a seven-week online discussion of Sacred Self-Care. To keep from flooding the inbox of my regular subscribers, this is a separate section on No Trifling Matter. You’ll only receive the daily prompts if you’ve signed up, so visit this link to join us. And get the book! I won’t be sharing the devotionals, so you’ll need the book to read along.

I recently had the joy of being a guest on the Women Scholars and Professionals Podcast sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I had a great conversation with host, Ann Boyd, about why self-care is important for women in academic settings. You can find the episode on their website and on iTunes.

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