You got up early.
You made breakfast.
You went to work. You remembered to bring your lunch.
You took care of your kids.
You paid your bills on time.
You went to the gym.
At some point, the social media era decided that taking care of yourself like a responsible adult needed to become much more than that. It needed a name and perfectly worded caption for the sake of being documented, shared, and for some reason, admired by other people.
This has made its way across to fitness culture, complete with the updated narratives for, again, normal adult responsibilities. Going to the gym became “showing up for yourself.” Getting stronger is now “becoming the best version of yourself”. If you wake up at 5AM, it’s because you’re “built different” from the rest of the crowd, and the sanctimonious post that accompanies this statement is usually the tell-all.
I truly don’t know when simply taking care of yourself became such a profound accomplishment.
I’m not suggesting that exercise isn’t important. It is. Taking care of your health is important. So is being disciplined. But something being worthwhile and profound are not necessarily the same thing. In 2026, we’ve found ourselves in an economized attention zeitgeist. Social media culture has made fitness far too self-important and it’s become a vortex of fixed behavior in hopes of gaining celebrity, money, or both. And often times, this end goal is prioritized over dignity or shame.
Fitness has Turned into a Performance
The internet has created a strange incentive structure around health and fitness. It’s not enough to actually do the thing anymore. Now you have to fit the optics of a person who does the thing. The workout has to be filmed, meals have to be photographed, and morning routines have to be glossy, aesthetically pleasing experiences.
If you enjoy making videos, make videos. If you enjoy cooking beautiful meals, cook beautiful meals. If both of these things help keep you accountable to your health and fitness, then have at them.
The built-in problem comes when the presentation of health starts becoming more important than the health itself.
Because that’s not real life.
People oversleep, get stuck in traffic, deal with sick children, work late, assist their sick, elderly parents, deal with work stress, eat meals out due to time constraints or lack of energy, take on double shifts, get only 45 minutes to train some days, and miss workouts altogether on others.
Perfection is the enemy of progress. It’s about doing the best you can with the circumstances you’ve got.
Fitness is not a Morality Play
This is where I think things get even more interesting. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, tasteless internet fodder has caused humanity to gradually attach moral value to physical behaviour. And it’s all evaluated in the most binary way possible.
The disciplined person trains. The lazy person doesn’t. The committed person does meal prep. The person who doesn’t must be making excuses. The person who gets up at 5:00 a.m. is serious. The person who sleeps until 7:00 because they were exhausted is less committed. A six pack is now evidence of character. An impossibly challenging workout becomes evidence of work ethic.
Hey Everyone, Gather Round and watch me Tell you to Leave me Alone
I’m questioning why we feel the need to turn the act of being disciplined and doing the best we can, into some moral virtue that must become a spectacle and must be applauded.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with being disciplined. But to me, there is something strange about needing everyone else to know that you are.
This need for external validation becomes supported by a bastion that creates itself by way of new verbiage: Exercising, eating better, and losing some weight becomes “changing your life, choosing yourself, and becoming who you were meant to be”.
I miss the days where it would just be summed up as starting to take better care of yourself.
The Real World Doesn’t Operate Like Instagram
In many of the talks I give to fitness professionals at conferences, I make note of a major area where elite programs made by great coaches in the strength and conditioning world drop the ball: It often assumes a clean slate of the lifter reading it – Perfect sleep, solid meal prep, an accommodating schedule, great recovery, and perfect program adherence.
Interestingly, I’ve noticed this shortcoming isn’t a niche issue; it’s also one of the biggest problems with modern fitness culture. But real people don’t live that way.
People have jobs, and children, and families, and financial stress, and vacations, and emergencies and obligations that don’t care whether today was supposed to be leg day.
It’s one reason I’ve always pushed back on the obsession with pedantically optimizing every last variable. I don’t care how many times is ideal to chew your food before swallowing it to maximize protein synthesis. Just eat the chicken.
At some point, the pursuit of optimization becomes less useful than simply being adaptable. There will be times where you train for an hour, have a perfectly prepared meal, get 8 hours of sleep and recover fully, and there will be other times where you get a 30-minute workout in, eat crap, and pull an all-nighter.
Fitness shouldn’t become your life, because it’s impossible to sustain that. When fitness serves your life instead of consuming it, you know you’ve taken a step in the right direction.
You Don’t Need a Round of Applause
As a society, we’re capable of taking fitness culture a little less seriously without taking our health any less seriously. Every workout doesn’t need to be a spiritual awakening, and your discipline level doesn’t need to be explained to strangers for evaluation. Everything isn’t a “journey”, and every positive change doesn’t need to come with a dissertation. You haven’t become more enlightened and figured life out just because you’re more muscular than before. That might be 10 percent helpful to 10 percent of the population, but the remainder is most likely performative nonsense.
Take care of yourself. Train, get strong, eat well, and maintain your health. You should be proud of yourself for doing so. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees and lose sight of what doing all this means.
They’re part of living a good life.
Not the entire point of one.
