Stuff: Self-improvement won't get us out of this mess

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“It’s exhausting to watch.” So says Dr Morgan Edwards, as she attempts to describe the vaccine misinformation spread by so-called mumfluencers.

Mothers with large online followings, they promote “wellness”, yogawear, supplements, “therapies” of doubtful value and, increasingly, anti-vax conspiracy theories.

As Stuff’s Kirsty Johnston showed earlier this week, mumfluencers are a central component of the Covid Convoy, their influence deriving from the role mothers play in making vaccination decisions for their household.

These bloggers and Instagrammers are not just exhausting but also impossibly irritating. Their relationship with science is tenuous at best, and they have no conception of the advantages they enjoy: their gospel of “wellness” is inaccessible to people who can’t afford organic vegetables or don’t have time to meditate for an hour a day.

Mumfluencers have their roots in the hippy left, but as that was often an individualistic form of protest – the “turn on, tune in, drop out” part lasted rather longer than the commune-building one – it was always vulnerable to overlapping with the libertarian far-right.

And indeed the two movements have now coalesced around fears over bodily freedom and shared suspicion of the state, as documented by Conspirituality podcaster Matthew Remski.

But we shouldn’t let our irritation with mumfluencers blind us to their insights. They understand, better than anyone else, the depth of our frustration with modern life. Tired, stressed, anxious, and working insane hours, in a world where conventional religion offers far less direction and structure than it once did, we naturally seek wellness, a sense of peace, a higher purpose.

As I’ve previously written, mumfluencers have diagnosed a real problem. They just have entirely the wrong answer.

The main issue with modern life, after all, is not that it is too collective, too government-driven, but that it is too individualistic. We blame people too much for their failings, ignoring the deep social and structural causes of illness, unemployment and despair.

And if individualism is the problem, the mumfluencer remedy – a relentless focus on personal self-improvement through mindfulness, supplements and the like – will hardly get to the heart of things.

What, then, is the solution? Take one of our most vexing issues: time. No-one, from shift-laden hospitality workers to stressed public-sector contractors, seems to have enough of it. Many are working longer hours than they would like. (Alongside, of course, those who want more employment.)

That’s partly because where it used to take just one income to raise a family, it often now needs two. The proportion of two-earner families has risen from under 50 per cent in the 1980s to over 70 per cent today. In nearly half of all households, both parents work full-time.

Few of the couples I know would want it that way: they’d rather both work part-time. But they simply wouldn’t earn enough, not if they wanted to pay the rent or mortgage.

That in turn points to two key problems with New Zealand’s economy: wages are pitiful, and housing costs exorbitant. The first problem is caused partly by weak productivity, but more substantially by a fall in the share of company income going to workers (as opposed to owners), from 70 per cent in the 1980s to under 60 per cent today. If it were restored, the average worker would earn $14,000 more each year.

And wouldn’t that allow lots of time off, reducing stress and denting the mumfluencers’ appeal? A four-day working week would help, too.

A similar logic holds for housing, where we need a huge collective effort to drive costs down and reduce individual despair. So too with mental health. Rather than just expecting individuals to meditate​ their distress away, we should also address its social causes, which include the stressful, precarious and casualised work environments many must endure.

Even the treatments for mental distress should be collectively provided, through a fully functioning public health system. The Labour Government has lifted mental health funding, but struggles to convert it into improved services.

Politics must offer these answers; otherwise, things could take a dark turn indeed. If we don’t ensure both parents can happily work part-time, the rise in two-earner households could be twisted to put the blame on women’s entry into the paid workforce, fostering a fundamentally regressive movement that takes the 50s housewife as its model.

Nor is this a notional concern: “trad wives” views, as they are known, have been voiced by some parliamentary occupiers.

We need, moreover, to change not just our political policies but also our values, ambition and delivery. Labour superficially speaks the language of “well-being”, but has never really followed through on it. And that’s part of the problem. Disillusionment with collective solutions helps push people towards mumfluencers. Restoring a sense of shared purpose and mission to politics is part of the task of drawing them away again.