Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

by Barbara Ehrenreich

But stay around a little longer—thirty years of attending various gyms around the country in my case—and the picture looks a little less idyllic. Despite the pulsing pop music and comfortable clothes, gyms are not sites of spontaneity and play. There are rules beamed out from video monitors, mostly innocuous ones, like no cursing, “staring” at others, or expressing effort in audible form such as grunts or panting. Once, in a Key West gym, which you might imagine to be a somewhat permissive environment, I saw the manager chastise a young woman for moving too freely and rhythmically. “No dancing in the gym,” he announced, nonsensically, as if to underscore the seriousness of our undertaking. A regimented dancelike experience, as in aerobics or Zumba, is fine, but unsupervised dance moves reek of hedonism, and working out is supposed to be a form of work. Most people come with a plan like “legs and shoulders today” or “45 minutes of cardio and 15 minutes of abs,” usually preceded by a warm-up and topped off with several minutes of stretching on a mat. Working out very much resembles work, or a curious blend of physical labor and office work. Members not only lift weights, for example, they often carry clipboards on which to record the number of reps and sets and the amount of weight lifted for each workout, like a supervisor monitoring a factory worker’s performance.