Margaritas at the Mall

The way we exercise is actually pretty weird

The opening salvo of Mark Greif’s 2016 essay collection Against Everything is a polemic on exercise, which he says is “like a punishment for our liberation. The most onerous forms of necessity, the struggle for food, against disease, always by means of hard labor, have been overcome.” And instead of channeling this collective surplus into public pursuits and civic grandeur (“like Periclean Athens”), or simply learning to relax and enjoy the abundance we’ve gained, we go to the gym to burn it off. At a glance, it’s extremely ordinary behavior to spend hours a week working out, but Greif is here to convince us that it’s actually pretty weird. As someone who probably spends too much time at the gym myself, I am open to this possibility. It is weird! Greif situates fitness culture at the nexus of several contemporary threads: the relentless quantification of everything, the drive to optimize the self, the decline of public space—and, of course, “wellness,” as the concept has come to be known. We all want to be “well,” or should want to, at least. But why? Greif probes at our reasons for compulsively exercising, one by one: looking good, feeling good, living longer. He compares the abdominal six-pack to an “insect’s segmented exoskeleton.” For Greif, every explanation only raises more questions—most of them more versions of “why?” And every successive “why” ratchets up the tension. Do we know why? Are we sure? (He did warn us that he’s *against everything* didn’t he?)

Greif originally published this essay in 2004 but it anticipates the digitally mediated, image-saturated culture that would develop over the subsequent twenty years. “The doctrine of thinness,” he writes, “admits the dream of a body unencumbered by any excess of corporeality.” Although the internet emerged as a technology that freed us from our bodily constraints, we’ve since reintroduced or reaffirmed many of those constraints, however superficially. “Because we spend our life indoors—like animals in a zoo—we are obsessed with the weather,” architect Rem Koolhaas once cynically quipped. We remain similarly obsessed with our bodies as the internet hypothetically diminishes their practical significance. As Grief notes, our corporeality is increasingly a liability, our bodies diminishing assets that require constant maintenance. A robust gym routine is correlated with vocations that involves little physicality other than managing one’s energy level throughout the day, and that struggle is difficult in proportion to how much of our work takes place sitting behind a computer screen.

But the image of “Incredible Hulks who push papers,” as Greif describes one type of contemporary gym rat, is absurd—a physical adaptation entirely out of whack with environmental conditions, serving little practical purpose, as if to repudiate the idea of evolution itself, or to suggest that it no longer manifests itself primarily in our bodily forms. One can imagine a waifish, cerebral human more appropriately adapted for the urbanized, digitized 21st century, the corporeal counterpart to Allbirds and athleisure wear. When Chloë Sevigny (or anyone else) complains about New York City being overrun by Lululemon and dogs, she alludes to a similar evolutionary dissonance: Many people inhabit a version of the city that is as comfortable as their living room, and are finally dressing accordingly. Our dogs, like our workout regimens, express a resource abundance, one that demands more and more outlets as it grows. Greif would like us to dream bigger, and direct these resources toward more ambitious ends, rather than “hoarding our capital to earn interest.” But it’s easier to point this out than to come up with better ideas. What do you get the culture that has everything?

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Last week’s issue was about the internet’s failure to create meaning in proportion to all the content it generates, and why the physical world is still better at doing that.

Reads:

• More than 1,000 vacant homes in the Atlanta area are occupied by squatters (many of these homes are owned by institutional investors). The increasingly automated nature of property management makes it easier for squatters to move in: “The advent of self-showings allows would-be tenants to request a viewing and receive a code to enter a property, which can go awry when the information falls into the wrong hands. And fake lease documents are readily available on the internet.”

• How the shopping cart changed our consumption patterns.

• The introverts have taken over the US economy.