You always hear people complaining about work. I do not think human beings hate labor. Just stolen labor. What is the difference?
A beaver builds a dam because instinct tells it to. It does not sit there, imagining a better dam, sketching out its ideal version. It does not compare different dam building philosophies, willing that imagined structure into reality. You know who does? We do.
That is one of the strangest but yet most beautiful things about us. We can imagine something that does not exist, and then act upon the world, until it does. A house, a song, a garden, an idea, a relationship, a life. We are not just creatures who exist in nature. We transform nature. We metabolize the world through labor, and in doing so, produce ourselves.
This is why I have never really believed the idea that people are naturally lazy. I think they are exhausted, alienated, underpaid, over-managed, disrespected, surveilled, and robbed of meaning. But lazy? I do not think so. People love doing things.
People love building things, fixing things, organizing things. We love decorating rooms, making playlists, cooking meals, tending plants, writing code, raising children, running, lifting, making art. Even when people are “doing nothing,” they are usually still producing something: taste, identity, humor, community, fantasy, self understanding (all things being commodified btw.) The problem is not labor.
Too much of our labor does not belong to us. At work, you sell your time and energy, but the value you create does not return to you in full. Someone else owns the product. Someone else owns the platform. Someone else owns the schedule, the metrics, the uniform, the customer experience, the profit. You give your body, your attention, your patience, your personality, your fucking all, and all you get in return is only a fraction of what your labor produces.
Everyone is trying to extract something. Your boss extracts productivity. Platforms extract attention. Schools extract performance. Mobile phone applications extract data. Even hobbies get turned into content. Rest becomes optimization. The self, a brand. This is why weightlifting and bodybuilding feels different to me. Not because it is merely or aesthetic, or because I want to look good, (though I do.) But because bodybuilding is one of the few places in my life where my labor still feels like it comes back to me. No one can exploit my set and get bigger from me. No one can take my reps, my soreness, my recover, and deposit the gains into their own body. If I put in the work, the adaptation happens in me. The labor becomes flesh. The product is not abstracted away from the worker. The worker is the product. That is the addictive part.
In the gym, cause and effect feel unusually honest. It is simple, really. I apply effort to the world, and the world responds. I pick up the weight, and move it through space. I fail, adjust, return and try again. And over time, something changes. My body becomes the record of work performed. No more manager or shareholder or institution standing between me and the thing I produced, sucking out all the surplus value from my squat. The transformation is mine and mine alone.
I am not painting the gym as some fantasy of total self sufficiency. It is collectivist. Most of us could never afford to own all the equipment we use. The equipment, maintenance, down to the space itself. All of it would be absurdly inefficient for one person to privately own just to use for a few hours a week. So we pool resources. Everyone pays a small amount, and suddenly each of us gains access to far more than we could have alone. The same bench can serve hundreds of people. The same barbell can be used by anyone: older people trying to stay mobile, teenagers discovering themselves, exhausted workers trying to feel human again. The gym is shared infrastructure.
And yet the result remains personal. That is a beautiful contradiction. The means are collective. The transformation is individual.
The equipment belongs, in some sense, to all of us. But the labor cannot be collectivized in the same way. Nobody can do my set for me. Nobody can recover for me. Nobody can progressively overload for me. The social world can provide the conditions, but the adaptation still has to pass through my body.
This is why the gym feels like a glimpse of something less alienated. Not because it is outside capitalism. It obviously is not. Gyms are businesses. Supplements are marketed. Bodies are commodified. Fitness influencers sell insecurity back to us as discipline. The whole thing is still contaminated by the world it exists inside. But inside that contradiction, there is still something real. For an hour or two, I get to labor in a way where the product does not leave me. I get to consciously transform the world, even if that “world” is my own body. I get to imagine a version of myself and then participate in making him real. That does not feel like vanity to me. It feels like proof that I am alive. Maybe what we want is not a life without labor. Maybe that would not satisfy us at all. Maybe we are not trying to escape work in the deepest sense. Maybe we are trying to escape alienated work. Maybe we want labor that returns to us. Labor where we can recognize ourselves in what we have made, something to be proud of in its entirety. Labor where the process itself has dignity. Labor where the product is not stolen or turned against us.
That is what bodybuilding gives me, or at least what it lets me feel.