28 x 28: February Eight

YMCA Sociology

About half a month ago, I finally cracked and signed up for my local YMCA. The nice thing about the Y I've chosen to go to is that it's not only located very close to my apartment downtown, but it's attached to my place of work. This means that either after work and before class, or after class late at night I can easily get in a quick workout. Since I've more or less been going every day for the last two and a half weeks, I let my mind muse a little while I was running tonight.

In today's world, it's hard not to be a little cynical. It would be false to think that many of the interactions we have with people both stranger and familiar are not motivated by self-gain. How often do you find yourself walking down the street these days and exchanging friendly greetings with passers-by? Granted, that kind of behavior in today's society is just as likely to get you branded a lonely, desperate lunatic as it is a kindly citizen of the world. Still, the point stands. The world for better or worse in most cursory encounters is a tad on the guarded side, if not sometimes hostile. With that in mind, I was a little stunned to observe that in a gym setting most people are far more inclined to be cordial if not downright nice. People hold doors, respectfully yield machines, make an effort to help others out, and sometimes even start up a casual conversation. It's an odd thing, to a certain degree, and I imagine it has a lot to do with the idea of a gym in the first place. A gym finds a large group of strangers all gathered in one building under a common purpose; doing silly things to get or stay in shape. The fact that everyone is united under a common ideal is the easy part. A singular purpose can be one of the most unifying forces in human society. The real lynch pin of the oddity though can be found in the second action: doing silly things.

Now, I am not at all trying to posit that working out to stay in shape is a bad or even weird thing. Instead, in the most basic sense of it, the actions involved in exercising are downright strange when you take a step back. Running in circles for miles? Lifting heavy metal objects over your head over and over? Riding a stationary bike for hours at a time? Watching yourself stretch in a variety of poses in front of a wall-sized mirror? All of these things are fairly common, but if you were to take away all sense of leisure in an average human life these things would be absurd. In the Darwinian sense, exercise is hard to classify. On the one hand, exercise enables you to be a more fit and therefore more desirable candidate for natural selection. On the other, running around in a loop for three miles serves absolutely no purpose in furthering the survival of your day or the propagating of your life. It is because society as a whole has evolved to a point where the option to exercise has become a commodity as opposed to a necessity that something like a gym even exists. This is where the argument comes back around. Essentially, in this day and age, going to the gym is a choice. No one's forcing you to go and do 20 crunches, just like no one is forcing you to eat 4000 calories of delicious candy a day.

The concept of choice is crucial in my understanding of the unity that happens in a gym. Everyone there has chosen to come and do the silly things needed to exercise otherwise neglected aspects of the body. Now, because these acts require an individual to not only do said silly action, but forces them to be vulnerable in doing so to a wide selection of people that really causes the togetherness. No one likes to feel singled out for being different. As stressed and important as it is to embrace your own individuality, on a fundamental level humans strive to be uniform. This fear of being mocked further drives what would otherwise be disparate groups of people into a necessary homogeneous unification. And so we have people who would otherwise pass just as soon as look at you suddenly holding doors for you, or asking you how a machine works. Just like that the group has a reason to be civilized to one another again.

On top of everything else, going to the gym breeds a certain kind of communal desire. Working out at a gym, particularly running on a track for a few miles, can be one of the most isolating things a person can do. Such exercise depends almost entirely on the personal drive of the individual. This is also most likely what makes it so hard for so many when it comes to getting some exercise. At the end of the day, the only person you have to deal with is yourself. So as is natural in almost all human experience, we reach out for that connection with others. Our desire to no longer be isolated causes us to actively include others in ways that would not happen under different stimuli. Running with a partner, having someone spot you while you lift, even silently competing with another gym patron to push your own limits are all tantamount to a deeper and baser human instinct to group.

In the end, the gym is a very interesting societal happening to observe. On the surface it may seem like common sense to be civil to a fellow human being, but in a heightened and logically unusual situation such as this the subtleties are so much more profound. The gym is kind of like the new age version of nomads migrating for a lifestyle or hunters working as a group. It all starts with a choice and is shaped by things so intrinsic to being alive as a human being that were we to not stop and ponder, we would likely miss entirely.