Fitness
Version 1.0.0 - June 1, 2025
My relationship to fitness (much like my relationship to diet), has gone through many changes as I learn more about myself and settle into a more stable adult life. It seems I only really started taking fitness seriously sometime around the age of 18 or 19, when the task of ascending four floors of stairs in a university building with a single crowded elevator struck me as unreasonably difficult for someone of my age. From that point on I made it a point never to be that out of shape again, and thus my fitness journey began.
From that time on, until I reached the age of about 24 or shortly after, I was an avid gym-goer, averaging 3 or 4 days a week doing a mix of cardio and primarily core and lower-body strength training. In retrospect, I realized that what the gym grind principally did for me was two-fold - it gave me a beneficial outlet for "working on" my self-perceived physical insecurities, and it gave some psycho-physiological relief to the symptoms of anxiety that I struggled with. (It was later on that I learned the term "anxiety lifting" - which is not uncommon among particularly neurotic young men).
To the end that working out was working on my insecurities, it was positively constructive (or at least not actively destructive) and may have had the effect of balancing out the other, destructive tendencies that lurked in the shadow. Between working odd part-time jobs and going through college, working out was the only other thing than drugs, video games, or social media that anyone in my world did - and I had already burnt myself out on video games and social media, and drugs (at least the boring ones) didn't ever interest me that much. Working out, unlike those other passtimes, had the potential effect---provided it was supported by a good sleep routine and diet; which it was, given the anxiety-driven particularity I paid to both of those things---of enhancing or ameliorating those aspects of my body with which I was uncomfortable. Did it work, though? It's hard to say now; precisely to what degree working out played into the general sense that I'm more attractive now than I was before; precisely how genuinely weak or unattractive I was versus how much it was just in my head. Nonetheless, that was then, and now I do feel like I'm better off for at least not neglecting my physical fitness---even though I may not be a gym rat any longer, I still like to think that I maintain a good level of activity and physicality.
To the end that working out was ameliorative to my anxiety, though the immediate relief lay in the extent that I pushed my body, the final solution to that issue lay in my psyche. It was developing a meaningful relationship to psychology and philosophy - becoming my own therapist - and a healthy dose of LSD in a guided trip experience that finally put my anxiety to rest.
Thus, now working a full-time corporate career job and being (nearly) free from my anxiety symptoms, I've stepped away from the gym. My current level of activity means dealing with the monotony and sendentarism of a desk job by taking walks or going for runs, meager body weight workouts and stretching routines, and - when I can really get enough time to myself - hikes in the beautiful New England wilderness.
I feel like I have more to say on this topic - certainly on sedentary lifestyles and hiking. Let's see if I'm going to be lazy for a few months again or if I can muster enough focus to get my thoughts down on those soon enough.