Where Interest Goes to Die

I'm burned out. Tired. Despondent. At the end of particularly frustrating days I've caught myself thinking that this is where interest goes to die. I also think that soon after that, we aren’t speaking metaphorically.

But the feeling isn't mine. Say it out loud in almost any industry and you'll find heads nodding. A fatigue that everyone arrives at privately and independently is not individual, and it probably isn't about the work.

It can't be that we've exhausted the subject. Every subject I've been enamored with has gotten deeper the longer I've tunneled into it. Physiology has not gotten smaller. The way a body interacts with an endlessly adapting theory of mind is nowhere near settled. Nobody has come close to the bottom of how emotion attaches itself to the work of changing yourself. There is more here than any of us will finish. So the disparity is somewhere else.

What I've seen in fitness, and I suspect it holds for any subject, is that there are two places to stand. There is development and there is codification. From the beginning people have questioned and gone looking for better, usually against the advice of everyone around them. Some of them find something. Fewer are tenacious enough to describe it to anyone else. The most influential do both — they explore and they explain.

Then there is the majority, and the majority indoctrinates the codification. They never step outside what is already known. Their life is dictated by another person's idea, an acceptance of text as scripture. They read it as gospel and defend it the way you would defend any serious truth. In their own eyes they are doing God's work, steering the flock away from danger, and by repeating what they were told is true they take up a position as clergy of the subject. And like any devout, they go looking for heresy to punish.

Because of this, the same arguments regurgitate. Is a back squat bad for you? What is the exact intensity that can get me good at the thing I don’t like doing? People have answers for you, and other people have other answers. Where your brand ends another begins. Where you leave an opening, missionaries come to baptize.

My fatigue has nothing to do with physiology. It has to do with people who believe there is nothing left to discover, and with the smaller and worse group who would rather you didn't look.

I've always been argumentative. Dinner at my grandfather's was debate as a matter of course. He questioned everything and argued everything, not to change your mind but to make certain you understood your own. My mother carried it on with full zeal. Nothing was off the table, because everything on the table was life — politics, sex, scandal, diet, war, whatever was on television. To this day most of our conversations end with us disagreeing, and nobody holds it against anyone. 

I thought of it as a gift for a long time, and some days it reads as a curse. I can't take anything on authority, including my own. I'm difficult in rooms where everyone has already agreed to stop asking. And the thing I built is hard to sell, because what most people are shopping for is certainty. And all I can promise is wonder.

It's in the gym now whether I planned it or not. I don't want consensus. We don't have a method. We adore the subject, so any honest push into understanding it is welcome. That makes us difficult to explain to anyone trained to identify things by name and follow paths that are already written. They want to know what we do. The answer is that we're finding out.

The internet is no help. It isn't built for wonderers, it's built to influence and consensus. When I argue with someone there, I'm rarely arguing that they should think what I think. I'm arguing for the right to still be looking. What exhausts me is how quickly people concede that.

There are plenty of bad ideas in fitness. Too many. Some are dangerous and a few are fatal. That is an argument for judgment, not for closing the question. Nothing kills my appetite faster than someone hunting for THE answer, because it's the same appetite as the person who's certain they already have it.

I watch enthusiasm die two ways, and they look like opposites.

The first is the person who has it figured out. Fitness is a handful of exercises, the right intensity, and repetition until the end of time. It works, it's defensible, and it is quietly boring, so eventually they stop.

The second is the person in total confusion. Too many answers, too many competing theories, facts that behave like fads. The uncertainty becomes unbearable and they quit.

Both of them believe the same thing. They believe there is an answer. One got bored of it and the other got tired of looking for it.

Imagine deciding what the best art is. Or the best job. The question isn't hard, it's malformed, and anyone still developing in either of those directions is developing because they've kept their attention on the question rather than the answer.

I get tired when my attention moves to answers. Supplying them for other people, or forgetting all of this and demanding them from myself.

At some point you'll hear me say that training is asking the question. That has never been instruction. It's a reminder to me that there's more here.

The question I have right now has very little to do with training, in the physical sense. It's about the culture around it. Why is it so hard to find or build a room where people are genuinely driven to explore this — where not knowing is the price of admission, where the newest person and the most experienced one are both still looking, and where being wrong out loud costs you nothing but deeper conversations?

I don't have that answer either. What I notice is that I want to work on it, which is not how any of the last few weeks have felt.

I'm standing in our space imagining what it could be and who could push it in that direction, and I realize I'm not tired at all. It feels like I just woke up.