Social Matter

My father is getting on up there in years, early sixties to be exact, but he’s in enviable shape for his age. Just last September, for instance, I saw him paddle a kayak for a couple miles against the wind on a choppy lake without taking a breather, and it didn’t get the best of him. He hikes with his dog regularly. And he’s got that proverbial old man strength in his hands, which you can witness any time he picks up a tamp bar. To my knowledge, the last time he lifted weights or even had a dedicated workout regimen was in his college football days. Mostly he “gets his exercise” from his job, which is blue collar and demands daily manual labor. (And also from his habit of repairing to the great out of doors whenever he has a free weekend, which I alluded to above.)

I, on the other hand, am your garden variety gym bro. There’s nothing in my day-to-day life that necessitates a whole lot of physical activity. I get in my truck and drive across town to what amounts to a desk job. I can laze around there all day if I want to, eating pork rinds out of the vending machine, lifting nothing heavier than a briefcase. At home, likewise, there’s very little I have to do that requires a significant expenditure on my part. But I do exercise regularly. My father stays fit because the normal contours of his life require a certain level of fitness from him. I stay fit because there are several hours of my week that I compartmentalize and set aside to spend in my gym moving weights.

I used to think that, when Christ said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, he had uttered some esoteric spiritual truth. Nowadays, though, it strikes me as a plain and unvarnished observation about how people behave when they experience any sort of plenitude. Maybe I’ll stay on the weightlifting wagon. Maybe I’ll fall off. (I’ll confess that I quit working out for a long stretch after I got married. But that’s really just another illustration of the point I’m trying to make: folks generally do what the exigencies of their life—such as the instinctual drive to pair bond—require. But not much beyond that.) The fact of the matter, though, is that falling off the wagon wouldn’t kill me, or even really materially harm me in the short term. If a laborer like my father quits laboring, however, his livelihood would begin to suffer almost immediately.

In other words, the bodily health of people like my father is organic in a sense that the health of people like me isn’t. It emerges from the circumstances of their life, whereas for ours it is either tacked on or it is not there at all. There are analogues in almost every facet of the modern’s—and even moreso the Millennial’s—experience, I think. Many of the people whose lifestyles no longer include exercise of necessity simply let themselves go. They drink beer and binge watch Netflix in the evenings. They get skinnyfat and wake up at forty on the road to cardiac arrest. In the same way people whose lifestyles no longer demand that they put forth cognitive effort, and precious few do in any compelling sense, often forgo it, let their faculties atrophy, sink into the popcorn-brain confusion of social media stimulation and push-button entertainments. The pageantry of the world passes them by and they comprehendeth it not. There are other analogues as well. Those who don’t need community ties for survival don’t forge them. They subsist on a “significant other” and the occasional office party. Those whom the grocery feeds never learn to produce food. Those who don’t need children to care for them in their dotage don’t have them. And thus all those relationships and pursuits that have been our satisfactions since deepest antiquity, the ancient health of man, go unnoticed by the wayside.

This observation, when you boil it down, is essentially just a paleo critique applied more broadly than our dietary needs. But I think it might do us well to ponder occasionally how “rich” our lives are compared to the norm of almost any historical people. And thus, paradoxically, how difficult it is for us to be righteous, to be complete. Perhaps we are those who laugh now and only later shall we mourn and weep. Perhaps we are those that are full and we shall yet hunger. Perhaps, despite an embarassment of luxuries and provisions and security, we still struggle to enter the kingdom of God, to be at peace with ourselves, because it takes efforts over and above the quotidian demands of our lives to prevent essential aspects of ourselves from dissolving gradually into obsolescence. It would certainly be a cosmic irony if that were true.

Usually, shameless propagandist that I am, I try to end my weekly offerings here with some sort of moral of the story, some take-home point. I’m not sure I have one this time around. I think it would behoove us to keep in mind that the material triumphs of the contemporary West ought to be scrutinized as much as its spiritual failures, so that we can attempt to account for and adjust to them. That might do us some good. But really this is just one of those thoughts that occasionally crosses my mind between sets of deadlifts, when I am out in my detached garage, surrounded by all manner of plates and bars and other implements, attempting to maintain a baseline level of masculinity that is entirely irrelevant to my current survival needs. At moments like those I pray that God teaches me and you and all of us to live whole and upright lives—in a world that in some ways attempts to bulldoze us over and in others doesn’t even offer us the resistance necessary for growth.