Framework note: This essay is about what happens when effort is structurally prevented from carrying through. The gym is a closed loop: real exertion, no durable output, no external verdict. Persistence without selection. The subscription model depends on this — it needs effort to never resolve into anything that compounds, persists, or feeds back into the world. The alternative structures described here (food forests, composting, tool libraries) are cases where effort carries through and selection becomes explicit. See Running Comes First for the ontological claim and Role-Arity and the Structure of Emergence for the diagnostic.
The gym is a prosthetic. That’s not an insult — prosthetics are incredible. If you’ve lost something, or never had it, or need to rebuild from zero, a prosthetic can give you back a version of what’s missing. The gym does this for physical trust. If you can’t trust your body to carry groceries up stairs, to catch yourself when you trip, to exist in space without anxiety — the gym is genuinely life-changing. It gives you a controlled environment to rebuild the most basic relationship you have, which is the one between you and your own skeleton.
But here’s where I get lost.
Once that trust is rebuilt — once you can move through the world with some basic confidence that your body will do what you ask it to — why are you still there? What problem is the gym solving at that point? You’re lifting a barbell that goes nowhere. You’re running on a treadmill that doesn’t move. You’re pulling a cable attached to a stack of iron that will be in exactly the same place tomorrow regardless of what you did to it today. The effort is real. The exertion is real. The sweat, the soreness, the discipline — all real. But the output is nothing. Nothing got built. Nothing got moved. Nobody got helped. The entire caloric expenditure of your session vanished into heat and was absorbed by the HVAC system.
And I find this genuinely confusing. Not in a rhetorical way — I’m not building to a punchline. I’m actually confused.
Think about what a gym is, physically. It’s a building. Somebody looked at a piece of land in a neighborhood and decided: this is where people will come to perform effort that produces nothing. They poured a foundation, ran plumbing, installed industrial lighting and climate control, bolted machines to the floor, and opened the doors. Thousands of square feet of real estate, in actual communities, dedicated entirely to simulated exertion. People drive there, swipe a card, move heavy objects that don’t need moving, and drive home. The building collects monthly fees. Nothing else is produced. No food. No goods. No services. Just sweat, which evaporates, and muscle, which is its own reward and nobody else’s.
Now imagine that same lot is a community garden instead.
Same square footage. Same neighborhood. But now the physical effort that happens there — the digging, the hauling, the bending, the kneeling, the carrying of soil and water and lumber for raised beds — actually goes somewhere. Food comes out of the ground. People eat it. The neighborhood gets fresher produce and fewer food deserts. The soil improves over time instead of degrading. People are outside in weather that’s real instead of inside under fluorescent light that isn’t. And the physical demands are serious — ask anyone who maintains a garden plot whether they’re sore at the end of a weekend session. They are. Their grip is taxed, their back is worked, their legs are spent. The body doesn’t know the difference between hauling a bag of mulch and doing a farmer’s carry in a gym. The muscles fire the same way. But one of those activities produced food and the other produced nothing.
And if the counterargument is space — that gyms are more efficient per square foot, that you can’t grow food on a small urban lot — you’re thinking horizontally. Vertical gardening exists. Living walls, stacked planters, trellis systems, hydroponic towers — all of these let you grow food upward in the same footprint where a gym stacks cable machines and squat racks. A gym uses its vertical space to store more equipment for simulated effort. A garden can use that same vertical space to grow more food. The three-dimensional argument doesn’t save the gym. If anything, it makes the comparison worse, because a vertical garden can produce more per cubic foot than a horizontal one while the gym’s vertical expansion just means more machines bolted to more floors, producing the same nothing at greater scale.
But the garden is just where this starts. Once you see the pattern — physical infrastructure that demands real effort and produces real output — it’s everywhere, and the variety is staggering.
Take a food forest. A permaculture installation requires enormous physical effort upfront: earthworks, digging swales, hauling wood chips by the truckload, planting hundreds of species in deliberate layers from canopy trees down to ground cover. It’s some of the most demanding physical work you can do. But unlike a gym membership that resets to zero every month, a food forest compounds. The system gets more productive over time, not less. Five years in, it’s producing fruit, nuts, herbs, and medicine with decreasing human input. You did the equivalent of ten thousand deadlifts establishing it, and now it feeds your neighborhood for decades. A gym could never.
Or composting. A community composting operation means hauling organic waste, turning massive piles with pitchforks, managing moisture and temperature, building and maintaining bin infrastructure. It’s hot, heavy, unglamorous work — nobody’s posting their composting PR on Instagram. But the output is literal soil. You are manufacturing the substrate that everything else grows in. Every restaurant in your neighborhood is throwing away organic material that could be cycling back into the ground as fertility, and the physical labor of making that happen is at least as demanding as anything in a weight room. Except at the end of it, you have soil instead of nothing.
Watershed restoration is another one. Pulling invasive species out of riverbanks is backbreaking. Planting native vegetation along waterways, moving rocks to reshape channels, building check dams to slow erosion — this is grueling, full-body, outdoor work that leaves you wrecked in exactly the ways the gym promises to. And the result is a functioning waterway. Cleaner water. Healthier fish populations. Reduced flooding downstream. A restored ecosystem that will persist and improve long after the soreness fades.
Community workshops and tool libraries need physical space, and the work that happens in them — woodworking, welding, bicycle repair, furniture building — is intensely physical. You’re standing for hours, lifting materials, operating tools that demand grip strength and core stability and coordination. And at the end, a chair exists that didn’t before. A bike works that was broken. Your neighbor has a shelf because you built it. The effort went into an object that someone will use.
Trail building and maintenance. Aquaponics facilities where fish farming and plant cultivation feed each other in a closed loop that needs constant physical tending. Rainwater harvesting systems that require digging, plumbing, and building cisterns. The list doesn’t end because the world is full of ecological and community systems that need human bodies to establish and maintain them. Every single one demands real physical effort, every single one serves the community or the environment or both, and every single one produces something tangible.
So why the gym? Why, out of this enormous landscape of physical infrastructure that could exist in our communities — food forests, composting operations, tool libraries, watershed projects, gardens both horizontal and vertical — did we default to the one option that produces nothing?
The answer is that the gym is the only one you can charge a monthly subscription for.
A community garden doesn’t generate recurring revenue. It generates food, which flows to the people who work it. A food forest requires upfront investment and then increasingly pays for itself. A composting operation turns waste into a product. A tool library amortizes its costs across shared use. All of these are economically real, but none of them produce the clean, extractive cash flow that a gym does. The gym’s entire business model depends on a specific, almost perverse, condition: that the effort happening inside the building never produces anything that could compete with the building’s revenue stream. The moment your exertion creates value — food, goods, services, infrastructure — you don’t need the gym anymore. The gym needs your effort to stay sterile. It needs the loop to stay closed.
And this isn’t true of just any subscription. Plenty of things charge monthly fees — CSAs, tool libraries, streaming services. But most subscriptions deliver something that accumulates or persists. A CSA delivers food you eat. A tool library gives you access to durable goods. A climbing gym at least teaches you a skill that transfers to actual rock faces. The gym subscription is structurally different because its output is purely internal and perishable. Muscle atrophies within weeks of disuse. Cardiovascular fitness erodes on a rolling schedule. The “product” of your gym session has a built-in expiration date that your own biology enforces. You are both the factory and the landfill. The adaptation you produce today is already decaying tomorrow, which means the subscription can never resolve, because the thing you’re paying for is designed — by nature, exploited by commerce — to not last. That’s not a subscription. That’s a treadmill. You pay, you exert, the output spoils, you pay again.
This is why Planet Fitness can report $1.18 billion in revenue, with roughly 90% of it classified as recurring. Not despite the fact that their product produces nothing durable, but because of it. The emptiness is the feature. If your workout produced food, you’d eventually stop paying for the workout. If your exertion built things, you’d accumulate enough things and move on. But because the gym’s output is purely internal — muscle, which decays, requiring more gym — the subscription never resolves. You never arrive. You never graduate. The treadmill is the perfect metaphor: you run and run and stay in exactly the same place, and next month you pay again.
Compare this to a community garden, which has the opposite economic shape. The more you invest physically, the more productive the system becomes, and the less it costs over time. A food forest gets cheaper to maintain every year. Compost generates its own inputs. A well-designed permaculture system trends toward abundance. These are structures that want to make themselves unnecessary, or at least self-sustaining. The gym is a structure that needs you to never be done. The economic incentives are pointing in opposite directions, and we chose the one that points toward permanent dependency.
I think what happened is that modernity broke something. It severed the link between physical effort and productive output. For most of human history, if you were strong, that strength went somewhere. You built things. You carried things. You maintained the physical infrastructure of your own life and the lives of the people around you. Effort had consequence. But then we automated and abstracted and outsourced all of that, and we ended up in a world where most people sit in chairs for eight to ten hours a day, moving nothing heavier than a coffee mug. The body still craves exertion — it evolved for it, it deteriorates without it — so the gym emerged as a patch. A way to simulate the physical challenge that life no longer provides.
And as a patch, it works. If the alternative is sedentary decay, the gym wins every time. But then something else happened: someone realized the patch was profitable. That you could charge people indefinitely for simulated effort precisely because it never resolves into anything real. The adapter between body and world became a product. And the product works best when the underlying problem — the disconnection between effort and contribution — never gets solved.
This is the part that moves it from confusion to something sharper. I’m not confused about why individuals go to the gym. I’m confused about why we built an economy around making sure they never leave. The gym industry doesn’t just fail to reconnect effort with output — it can’t, because reconnection would end the revenue stream. The business model requires the separation to be permanent. Every food forest, every community garden, every tool library, every composting site is a threat to that model, because each one offers a way for physical effort to produce something real and therefore stop being a subscription.
The gym’s great trick is convincing people that exercise is a separate category of life. That you “go work out” the way you go to the dentist — it’s a thing you do in a dedicated building, on a schedule, with special clothes, and then you leave and return to your “real” life. But that framing is insane. Your body doesn’t stop being your body when you leave the gym. You don’t stop being a physical creature who exists in space when you swipe your membership card on the way out. The separation is artificial, and I think it’s actually harmful, because it trains people to think of physical effort as this quarantined ritual rather than as the baseline texture of being alive. And it’s not an accident that this separation is also the most profitable possible arrangement.
So what’s the alternative? It’s embarrassingly obvious: just go do things. Help someone move. Actually show up with your body and carry boxes down three flights of stairs. You will be sore the next day in muscles your gym routine never touches, because real objects don’t conform to the clean, isolated movement patterns of a cable machine. A couch doesn’t care about your form. It’s awkward, it shifts, you have to negotiate a doorframe and a weird angle and another person’s grip on the other end. It’s a full-body coordination problem embedded in a social context, and when you’re done, something actually happened. Your friend is in their new apartment. You helped. The effort landed somewhere.
Pick up trash. I know this sounds absurd next to a deadlift PR, but walk your neighborhood with a bag and actually bend down two hundred times to pick things up off the ground. Tell me your lower back and your grip and your legs don’t feel it. Tell me you don’t feel more connected to the place you live than you did after an hour on the elliptical. You can’t, because one of those activities embedded you in your environment and the other one deliberately isolated you from it.
I keep coming back to this question: what would it look like if we reabsorbed exercise into life? If instead of dedicating an hour a day to simulated effort, people just did more things? Carried their own groceries instead of getting them delivered. Walked to the places that are walkable. Fixed things in their homes instead of hiring someone. Helped people in their community with physical tasks. Not as a “workout” — not with a heart rate monitor and a protein shake — just as the way a person with a functioning body moves through the world.
I think it would look like people who are both fitter and less obsessed with fitness. Because the dirty secret of gym culture is that it breeds a weird self-referential fixation. You start going to the gym to get healthy, and then somewhere along the way the gym becomes the thing. You’re tracking macros and optimizing splits and comparing your physique to other people’s physiques, and the original impulse — to feel good in your body, to be capable, to trust yourself physically — gets buried under this enormous infrastructure of optimization that serves nothing except itself. You’re not getting stronger for anything. You’re just getting stronger.
I want to be careful here, because I’m not saying the gym is bad. I’m saying the gym is a stepping stone, and we’ve built an economy around making sure nobody steps off it. If you’re rehabbing an injury, the gym is exactly where you should be. If you’re an athlete training for a specific sport, obviously you need targeted work. If you genuinely enjoy the meditative quality of lifting heavy things in a quiet room, I’m not here to take that from you. But if you’re a generally healthy person who goes to the gym four days a week out of a vague sense of obligation, spending an hour performing movements that produce no output, and then you go home and pay someone to assemble your furniture — something has gone sideways. And it went sideways on purpose, because there’s a roughly $121 billion global industry that needs it to stay sideways.
I’ve started thinking of this as post-gym functionalism, which is a pretentious name for a simple idea: once your body works, use it for things that matter. Embed your physicality in your actual life. Let strength be a byproduct of contribution rather than an end in itself. The fittest people I’ve ever met weren’t gym rats — they were people who did a lot of physical things. Farmers, builders, people who maintain their own homes and help their neighbors and walk everywhere. They didn’t have “routines.” They had lives that demanded their bodies show up, and their bodies responded by being capable.
The gym is what you do when your life doesn’t ask enough of your body. That’s fine — it’s a necessary adapter for a world that stopped demanding physical effort. But the tragedy is treating the adapter as the destination. And the industry is treating it as a business model built on making sure you never arrive anywhere else.
We could have built food forests that feed neighborhoods for forty years. We could have built composting operations that turn waste into soil. We could have built workshops where people repair and create real objects. We could have restored the watersheds we destroyed. Instead, we built gyms — not because they were better, but because they were the only option where the effort never resolves, the dependency never ends, and the subscription never cancels.
That tells you everything.