I don’t know who needs to hear this but working out is embarrassing. Each day, as you contemplate your humiliation, what it will feel like to live in a puddle of your former self distilled as sweat, take a beat. This might not be worth it. 

When I opened the Apple Fitness app this weekend to search for a new routine, I felt like a sleazy digital scavenger. Hannah from Peloton has amassed a following, a straight-line hero among squiggly beggars. She and the Apple mods don’t look real. They could be generated, I think? 

And I’m even more anonymous than them. 

I see a woman named Nicole, and she’s got an R&B workout where I’ll lift weights to my teen idol’s hits and try not to remember how much harder he’s worked from 1997 to now. He’s extremely fit, having an unprecedented third act, rocking the biggest stage in his 40s because Millennials look like we’ll live longer on this hell planet. Live long enough to see the machines conquer us as we up-down and sumo squat ourselves into the dull, basic championship of an optimized existence.

We’ve faced a flood of factoids to keep us eating right, pins and bookmarks and saves to collect loads of workouts we’ll never do, wearable trackers that show us how much we’ve tried (or failed) that day. Ten thousand steps. Twelve hundred calories. There must be a haven for me to pray to my sweat, but I spend literal hours looking for it without finding a thing. 

Walk on an incline, heart rate never above 130 beats-per-minute (or the midrange between resting and max output), but never less than an hour. Bound the stair machine alone and read a book about a dying mother, 40 minutes, wipe the machines.

Return to the locker room and pass the calisthenics station. Someone is jumping with a medicine ball squeezed in their knee crooks, gripped by their thighs. Another person has resistance bands on their ankles while prayer-walking side to side, triangulated biceps hovering parallel to thigh bones. I am ignoring them and also taking notes on how to copy these exact steps for my next session.

I enter the locker room where an iPhone portrait video setup vacuums my breath. He’s posing to see his progress and the big red button is for him to go live any minute now. I won’t get half-nude in front of this man, but I also won’t stop what I’m doing because everything is normal.

Everything is normal here. The sweaty graphic tee suctioned to my cold, goosebumped skin is normal. The soreness in my knee is normal. The before-and-after photo is normal. The time lapse video is normal.

Embarrassment is normal.