Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Tim Lott’s bootcamp. It’s incredibly cheap and fun and informative and it will improve the quality of your life immeasurably.
There are many things I didn’t enjoy about growing up in England in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The terrible food, the awful fashion, the crushing boredom - I could continue for some time. But one blessing I did enjoy was the fact that nobody in my peer group expected me to exercise ( other than forcibly, during school hours).
It may be hard to believe for anybody under 50, but once upon a time, running in the street was reserved for when you wanted to catch a bus. There were almost no public gyms. Sport happened but it was collective, social and competitive. Solo suffering for fitness sake was relatively unknown. ‘Health’ was something you possessed as a birthright for most people - you didn’t have to work for it.
How things have transformed. Drinking and smoking have dropped to record lows ( I’m glad to say). But this isn’t enough for the millenials and Gen Z. Nowadays there seem to be more gyms than pubs. You can’t walk down the road without dodging someone sweating buckets as they grimly pound their way down the pavement, having no destination in mind but the completion of a certain number of Kms. Leave the pavement and some lycra clad lunatic is likely to nearly collide with you on their £2000 sports bike. Meanwhile, if it’s a hot day and you fancy a little dip, someone will go pounding past you in the pool or river trying get somewhere - I’m not sure where - as fast as possible,
What’s it all for? The modern religion of health/fitness/wellness. The more you exercise, goes the theory, the more you stay well, the longer you live and the better you feel.
Perhaps. But I cannot help but feel sceptical. I and much of my boomer cohorts spent much of their youth drinking and smoking and taking very little exercise. And yet since our generation is the longest living ever, maybe enjoying ourselves while we were young wasn’t such a bad bargain. Perhaps we will only live till 80 instead of 82 ( although so many other factors, like genes and luck come into play) but we will never be sure if it was a a result of our lifestyle habits or how long we might have lived otherwise.
Good exercise habits certainly tip the balance of probabilities of long and healthy life in your favour. But it is by no means a certainty. Other decisions, like healthy eating, are an easier choice to make, since eating a tomato or an apple instead of a pizza doesn’t involve as much suffering as doing a marathon. But is our current compulsive exercise culture actually about health? Young bodies, after all, are incredibly resilient. You don’t have to spend a large chunk of your leisure time doing bench presses and half marathons in order to stay reasonably fit. Moderate exercise - gentle cycling, walking and social games like tennis - are just as effective. Drinking and smoking aren’t a great idea, but it’s amazing what the youthful body can recover from.
So if all this puffing and blowing and sweating is in the final analysis a bit of a waste of time, then what’s it all for? Partly, I think, it’s just peer pressure. Health and fitness has become a cult, and a belief system. If you don’t do it then you will be an outlier, and we are all tribal in our behaviours - none more so than the current generation.
Then there is pure vanity, or insecurity - which sometimes amounts to the same thing. In the 60’s and 70’s visual culture was still in its infancy, albeit far more for men than women. For women, the appearance of fitness, or at least slimness, was considered a prime quality for attracting members of the opposite sex. Fat men, very unfairly, just got away with being deemed ‘stocky’ or ‘cuddly’. But since those decades visual culture and visual comparison has reached epidemic proportions, for both sexes. If you don’t have a six pack, or full enough lips, or large ( or small) enough breasts, then you are in danger of being out of the mating game. Back in the day, I don’t think we worried about it quite as much.
More pertinently, I think the fetish for exercise - like it’s cranky cousin, ‘wellness’ - it really comes down to fear of death, the idea that we can endless postpone they date of our passing by knocking ourselves out on the runing track or the bench press.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tim Lott's Writing Boot Camp to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.