Modernity metabolises everything into proof, performance, product.

As I scroll my social media feed I see an endless carousel of skincare and cooking obsession. Everyone is either cooking or doing skincare.

Even my mother who has no social media said: “Everyone is cooking or eating on TV.” She has a point.

I asked myself why is that. Why it has become so predominant and why now.

The “self” turned into an endless renovation project. A house that can never be finished, always under construction, scaffolds rattling, mirrors taped up with hashtags.

Rituals have become productivity. Tenderness performance.

Rituals once a place for communion, and for slow remembering, hijacked into optimisation routines.

Morning ritual a bio-hack.

Journaling content fodder.

Meditation performance of “calm.”

Tenderness (once relational, reciprocal, embodied) proof of virtue.

Instagram posts about how well we’re “holding space.”

Selfies crying, turned into currency.

What these trends show us? What are the cravings and longings behind them?

We don’t want skincare.

We don’t want cooking.

What we want is to hide.

To hide from death traced in your wrinkles. To hide from loneliness plated in symmetry. To hide from the chaos of a collapsing world in the tiny control of serums and sourdough.

Truth is: whole economies are built on it. The wellness industry thrives on our fear of decay. Social media feeds on our longing for attention.

Let’s see how neuroscience can help us map the loop:

dopamine spikes when we buy a new cream or see a new recipe,
mirror neurons fire when we watch influencers perform care,
the ventral striatum lights up when likes and shares arrive.

This is not random. It is design. An algorithm has convinced us that glow is salvation, that youth is belonging, that cooking can cure despair.

We believed it because it is easier to buy another serum than to face the terror of being mortal.

But obsession betrays itself. Look closer and you will see the shadow:

pores, wrinkles, imperfect meals pathologised as failures.
children too young for retinol scrubbing away their baby skin.
adults mistaking performance for nourishment.
endless striving, never arriving.

Science gives us terminology: dermorexia, body dissatisfaction, para-social influence, but language cannot hide what is really happening: we are trying to buy our way out of being human.

Every jar, every recipe is a confession.

A confession that we forgot how to love our skin without acid.

That we forgot how to feed ourself without an audience.

That we confuse optimisation with care, consumption with ritual, control with intimacy.

This forgetting is not only personal. It is cultural.

Sociologists call it the rise of individualism.

Ulrich Beck names it: biography as DIY project. You are told to optimize your own health, beauty, productivity not because it makes you more human, but because it makes you more governable.

Neoliberalism whispers: don’t ask for collective care, buy another product. Don’t demand community, build your brand.

And so we live in the acceleration society Hartmut Rosa describes: where even care must be productive, even rituals must be optimised. A 10-step skincare routine. A recipe curated for virality. Your humanity, repackaged as content.

Once, to touch the body was reverence. Once, to cook was to gather around fire and remember that we belong to each other.

These were never trends. They were memory. Rituals of being human. Rituals we have distorted, commodified, and then sold back to ourselves as obsession.

Science shows us the loops. Shadow shows the cost. The longing shows the truth: what we ache for is not glow. Not perfection. Not virality. What we ache for is tenderness, communion, reverence.

So I ask you:

What would it take to stop hiding?

To eat for hunger, not display?

To touch your skin not to erase death, but to meet it with tenderness?

What would it take to refuse the lie that care must be optimised, individualised, commodified?

Your rituals are already here.

They don’t need products.

They need your presence.

And maybe (just maybe) they need a fire to gather around again.

This is the poetic fire I invite you to gather around. Read it out loud to yourself:

I refuse to optimise myself as a product.

I refuse to buy belonging in jars and serums.

I refuse to turn ritual into routine for efficiency.

I refuse to perform tenderness for applause.

I am not a project.

I am not a brand.

I am not a feed.

I am a field

a body among bodies,

a thread among threads,

a life among lives.

After the refusal we must reclaim.

Reclaim ritual as slowness,

as breath,

as the hum of ancestors.

Reclaim tenderness as messy,

as private,

as a trembling hand held without witnesses.

Reclaim with the quiet rebellion of creating un-performable rituals. Practices that resist capture. Gestures that can’t be monetised, optimised, or posted. Things that lose their meaning the second they’re “shared.”

Small, imperfect, resistant rituals that don’t scale. Don’t sell. that can’t be performed for status.

You can download more poems in defiance of what rules us, to lit up our souls here. A renewal of old myths, old narratives and obsolete systems.

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