Doing nothing is self-preservation in the activist sense, not indulgence

Evidence

That’s a strategic function of nothing, and in that sense, you could file what I’ve said so far under the heading of self-care. But if you do, make it “self-care” in the activist sense that Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” This is an important distinction to make these days, when the phrase “self-care” is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming a cliché. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 107

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘self-care’ in Lorde’s activist sense, distinguishing it from commercialized wellness rhetoric.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own critique of wellness-as-consumption and to Lorde’s ‘A Burst of Light’ directly. — connects to: Abandonment means total responsibility, not helpless passivity — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1292; Activists must consciously perform respectable dress when no civic niche exists — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1277; Paying for survival rather than planting shifts activism to sustained maintenance. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1132
• QUESTION: The reader asks whether Odell’s solutions require privilege — the commercial appropriation point here is relevant to that critique.