MILLENNIAL SELF CARE = SELF RESPONSIBILITY

image via zazzle.com

You know it’s not pledge week when NPR rags millennials about ‘self-care.’

Instead of pledging money to them, they’ll buy an ‘experience’ instead.

Cue Jimi Hendrix?

Gracy Obuchowicz says it’s more than just social media that has pushed millennials to the forefront of the self-care discussion.

“Our generation has seen enough,” she said. “People are really hungry for knowledge. It’s a relatively new idea in our culture that we would be paying attention to how we feel and using that as a kind of intelligence. It’s something that’s really waking up in our culture and our generation.”

The real wake up call is coming and there’s nothing about millennial self help to make any difference.

Boomers still point fingers and blame them with the usual negative stereotypes.

What is the impending wake up call?

Kids. Then nothing else matters.

Once they wear out millennial bashing with calls of too sensitive, boomers will pick up another hammer and start swinging.

You can hear it now. “Millennials are ruining the next generation by helping their kids too much.”

If you listen carefully you’ll hear a helicopter sound.

Today, self-care, as it’s defined by Obuchowicz, a facilitator and self-care mentor and coach in Washington, D.C., “assumes that we’re OK as we are and we just need to take care of ourselves … Self-care alone is not enough. You need to have self-awareness too. Self-care plus self-awareness equals self-love.”

MILLENNIAL SELF CARE = SELF RESPONSIBILITY?

The most common plastic surgeries from 2016 via Harpers:

There were almost 1.8 million cosmetic surgeries performed in 2016. Here were the top five most popular:

1. Breast augmentation (290,467 procedures, up 4 percent from 2015)
2. Liposuction (235,237 procedures, up 6 percent from 2015)
3. Nose reshaping (223,018 procedures, up 2 percent from 2015)
4. Eyelid surgery (209,020 procedures, up 2 percent from 2015)
5. Facelifts (131,106 procedures, up 4 percent from 2015)

And there were a whopping 15.5 million minimally-invasive cosmetic procedures performed last year. Here were the most popular varieties:

1. Botox (7 million procedures, up 4 percent from 2015)
2. Soft Tissue Fillers (2.6 million procedures, up 2 percent from 2015)
3. Chemical Peel (1.36 million procedures, up 4 percent since 2015)
4. Laser hair removal (1.1 million procedures, down 1 percent from 2015)
5. Microdermabrasion (775,000 procedures, down 3 percent from 2015)

I could be wrong but I’ll say most self care surgeries don’t happen on millennials.

But, if you are looking into a few changes in the future, plasticsurgery.org will help.

For mole removal, click on Dr. MolePDX in the footer.

MILLENNIAL SELF CARE AGE DIFFERENCE

The author of the NPR piece is a college intern according to her webpage.

She looks at the obsession with self care with a skeptical eye. And she should.

Call it a learning curve, but getting older changes the angle you see things from.

What you’d never do, you now do. What you didn’t believe, you do believe.

Again, picture parents of young kids. Millennials won’t lock their kids out of the the house for their ‘me time.’

The habits they learned from their over-criticized millennial self care routines will make them the best parents of any generation.

This is something CJS can write about.