It Feels Silly to Write About Fitness
Takeaway Points:
It’s difficult to write about things like fitness when there are more serious and urgent issues that need to be addressed, like the state of the environment and climate change.
Many systems in our society directly contribute to a feedback loop that adds carbon to Earth’s atmosphere. The changes caused by this have been growing more extreme.
As part of these systems, individuals do have responsibility to do their best to live environmentally cleaner lives. There are actions we can all take to minimize our impact while acknowledging that as a society we do rely on things like cars, cheap power, and package delivery.
No matter how much individuals reduce their carbon footprint, what matters the most is legistlation which illegalizes or disincentivies wasteful emissions. People need to do what they can to get their leadership to do better.
I have been blogging for almost ten years, and during that time I’ve written so much about virtually everything that I can about fitness.
I’ve written about this before - oftentimes, it feels like there’s nothing to write about, not because I don’t have systems in place to regularly come up with good content, but because I’ve written about most of the things that there are to meaningfully write about. I’ve tried to write about everything, both on and off the beaten path, for a decade. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t always plenty more to write about, but it also means that sometimes you really do feel like there’s nothing more to write about.
My solution, in many ways, has been to branch out. I’ve tried to write a bit more about personal finance, about game design, and so on - because these are topics which have been personally insightful to me, and because I’ve wanted to share that insight with others. However, the reality is that while at this point I’m an expert in the fitness sphere, I’m still a relative beginner in a lot of other spheres, and that makes it harder to branch out too significantly.
One thing I’ve avoided mentioning too much up until this point is the elephant in the room: the environment.
The reality is that over the last five or so years, I’ve become acutely aware of the effects of climate change, and of the crisis that we’re now living through. Probably the single biggest shift in my thinking came about as a result of reading Donella Meadows’ book, Thinking in Systems. Amusingly, I read it because I felt that it would apply mostly to game design - instead, while it did do that, it also made me a lot more worried about the state of the climate and our effects on it.
In Meadows’ book, she discusses the effects of feedback loops - systems in which the output of a system involves some amplification of the inputs of a system. A simple example could be a business - you invest a certain amount of money, and the business now takes that money, spends it, and earns back slightly more than they spent in the process. Now you, the investor, have the money you invested back plus some additional amount - and if you reinvest that money back into the business (and assuming that the business continues to succeed), then you’ve created a feedback loop. Over time, that loop will generate more and more money exponentially - on a long enough timeline, even a very small investment can turn into a lot of money as a result.
Many people don’t understand how truly out of hand exponential growth can get. I work with it daily as a game designer, because idle games deal in very large numbers, but the point is that when something grows exponentially, it will very quickly grow very large no matter how small or large the exponential effect, simply because our brains are used to thinking in linear or asymptotic growth. You train hard in the gym, and you don’t keep growing exponentially forever - instead, you gain muscle rapidly in the beginning, and that quickly slows down as you get closer and closer to your genetic potential, which is some unknowable and fuzzy hard limit.
Exponential growth is very different, and results in very frighteningly fast changes. It can start out very small and slow, but then on a long enough timeline quickly ramp up to absurd heights. It’s one thing to visualize it on a graph, and another to see and understand the concept in the real world.
Every single time we burn fossil fuels, carbon is added to the atmosphere. This is an evident fact, and not the kind of thing that people argue about when they argue about climate change. They tend to argue that it’s not real because of some interpretation of some limited data they have, or that man-made emissions are really just a small part of the picture, or that the earth is capable of eliminating those emissions easily, or whatever the case is.
But the reality is that human systems tend to have built in feedback loops. The stock market is a feedback loop. Deforestation is a feedback loop. Human population has been growing exponentially within the last few hundred years, thanks to the extraordinary increase in living standards generated by the industrial revolution. Before that, it was largely stable for a long time. The growth of human population has been so rapid that we have built so many other things around it - stock markets go up because economies go up, and economies go up because more and more people are being born every year. Each new person born means that more space needs to be made for living, more food needs to be grown, more energy needs to be generated to power their homes, and so on. Population growth alone is not the sole problem (by far), but it has only accelerated and sped up the feedback loop of activities which make up the modern lifestyle.
People have gotten used to having lots of fancy electronics shipped around the world. They have gotten used to eating foods grown in other countries. They have gotten used to deliveries of food and other important goods directly to their doors. They have gotten used to cheap energy with massive side effects, and ignored those side effects up until now.
I don’t have any right to judge anyone. It’s hard not to be a part of that system, because I was born in that system. I don’t know how well I’d function outside of it. I enjoy gardening and have gotten into keeping a small garden lately, but I’m well aware that it’s a hobby that I enjoy - if I had to rely on it as a primary food source, for example, I’d be in big trouble. I work online, and know full well that my work uses up a lot of electricity on a daily basis.
However, I try to do what I can. I try to be conservative where I can. I don’t own a car, and prefer to use public transit. I only fly when necessary, and don’t believe much in tourism. Our electricity provider is a green energy company. I’m well aware, at the end of the day, that I’m not nearly as big of a problem as the “bitcoin” or “billionaire jet travel” or “the american military/industrial complex”.
It’s also hard to strike the right tone between “please try not to be wasteful” and “being a huge bummer”. My youngest stepkid is 12, and they constantly struggle to recognize the connection between “I want to do better for the environment” and the fact that they constantly leave lights on and their computer running, that they regularly want to order delivery, that their friends get to do X so why can’t they, and so on. It’s hard to live cleanly when peer pressure and your entire social group doesn’t recognize the value, especially when you’re twelve. As a parent, and by extension a huge fucking square, it’s not like I can push too hard on this topic without alienating my kid. They’ve got it hard enough without me harping on them about turning their lights off when they leave the house in the morning for the umpteenth time.
And ultimately, it also all feels very helpless. What really matters is legislation which illegalizes or disincentivizes wasteful emissions, a widescale shift in green energy, and fundamental changes in the way that we interact with the world. And worse, this needs to happen in numerous countries across the world, when it’s hard to get very many people to agree on anything. I don’t have much power to really change anything on that front, except to continue to lobby regularly, in my small sphere of influence, for a change in attitudes. I can post another climate-related spot of dark humor on my silly little twitter to my silly little circle of followers. I know that I’m not really a part of the problem - but it’s endlessly frustrating to know that I can’t do very much to fix it, either.
Then there’s the fact that the recent surge in cryptocurrency popularity has essentially erased, in a few short months, all of the gains clean energy has made thus far. It’s extremely frustrating, down to the depth of my core.
Writing about fitness sometimes feels very silly, in a “fiddling while Rome burns” sense. To write about this is difficult, because I’m a part of the fitness industry. I make a living writing about fitness, and no one wants to hear my thoughts on the ongoing climate crisis. Certainly, I’ll probably lose a few followers for having written this, or get hate mail from people who don’t believe in climate change and want to call me a beta cuck or whatever.
But at the same time, it’s the elephant in the room - it feels hard to write about fitness, when I know that there are so many more important things that I should probably be writing about. So, at the end of the day, I want to get it out, I have to get it out. I want to make whatever small dent in the problem that I can, because I need to do something or I’ll burst.
Let this radicalize you, rather than lead you to despair.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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