MosesWrites
Fifteen years ago, while in graduate school at Princeton, I wrote a post for the now defunct blog EqualWrites, “Opiate of the Abs and Asses.”
Then the advent of social media had just begun to explode personal fitness trends with endless photos of mostly young women showing off toned, sculpted flesh. Every phone, every screen had become the softporn of glossy magazine covers. I watched with intrigue the rapid uptake of lululemon and other athleisure fashion.
Now in Shanghai I see the same trends intensify all the more as conspicuous consumption wanes and people seek more demonstrable forms of meaning, discipline over profligacy. Wellness, fitness, all well and good.
Yet when does an escape from anxiety become an inducement of even greater anxiety? When does the desire for recognition distort the self into a body without being?
I’ve always been troubled by how torturously young people struggle with the transformation of their bodies from childhood to adolescence and early adulthood. I struggled tremendously myself. I see so many adults who continue to struggle profoundly with their bodies. I don’t imagine it will ever happen easily, given the flood of hormones and emotions and expanding physical and intellectual strengths we gain, the social pressures that endure forever.
Yet the level of toxicity and the amplification of alienation has reached a new extreme, a mass distortion of personhood. Our selves have been given over to snapshots on the internet, to lifestyle vlogs, to a race of head-lowered people as the Chinese neologism 低头族 has it.
The obsession with numbers, a personal record, steps taken, kilometers run, calories burned, calories consumed, weights lifted, minutes passed, reps, endless endless endless quantification that fuels the very anxiety of capitalist creation and consumption that entraps us. A quest for meaning and wholeness becomes the descent of addiction.
Feel: how do you feel? Your body, your soul?
When have you ever seen a statue of Budha with ripped abs? With a toned bum or chiseled chest?
Core, strength, satisfaction, navigated ambivalence. A smile. Your eyes. The absolute amazing enchanting sexiness of eyes: yet so often hidden behind the phone of a selfie snapshot, or head amputated entirely so all we have is a body, an object, nothing to love.
Take off those fitness watches, strip those counts from your mind. Find stunning beauty within that yes, in lust and love and power and passion reflects itself in your body. Yet without that reflection from within all that effort has nothing more than chimeric deception, only and entirely the reflection of narcissus.
Obviate the opiate of the abs and asses and instead know as Kesha does, “your love is my drug.”