Be More Human

More Human,

While everything else gets automated, the gym is one of the last places that still asks you to show up

Last Tuesday, a member walked in fifteen minutes before her workout, sat on the bench she’s used for six years, and talked to three different people before she ever touched a barbell. No notifications. No agenda. Just people in a room paying attention to each other. I almost didn’t notice it, because it happens here every day. Then I thought about how rare that’s actually become everywhere else.

The Easy Button Is Everywhere Now

We are living through the fastest automation of daily life in human history. Work tasks, customer service, writing, scheduling, even thinking itself is being handed off to software that does it faster and asks nothing of you in return. Most of that is genuinely useful. But somewhere in the rush to make everything frictionless, we started treating friction itself as the enemy. Hard conversations get replaced with a text. Physical effort gets replaced with a delivery app. Mental effort gets replaced with a prompt. The "easy button" used to be a joke about an office-supply store commercial. Now it is the default setting on most of modern life.

There is a cost to that, even when each individual trade feels harmless. A 2023 federal public health advisory framed the erosion of social connection as a crisis on the scale of smoking, citing research showing that a lack of close relationships carries health risks comparable to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. More adults report feeling lonely right now than at almost any point on record. That is not a coincidence running parallel to automation. It is connected to it. Every task you no longer have to do with another person, or struggle through yourself, is a small disconnection from being human. Stack enough of those up, and you get exactly what we are seeing: a more convenient life and a less connected one. Soft and alone.

What the Gym Still Demands

This is why I think the gym matters more now than it did twenty years ago, and not for the reasons most people assume.

It is not about the workout itself, although that matters too. It is about what the gym refuses to automate. You cannot outsource a deadlift. You cannot prompt your way through a fifteen-minute AMRAP. You have to show up, in a body, in a room, and do something hard, in front of other people who are doing the same thing. Nobody is coming to do it for you, and there is no app that makes the weight lighter. For one hour, you are not managing inputs or optimizing a system. You are just a person working.

That is not nothing. It might be one of the last places in most people’s week where that is still true.

CrossFit Teaches You That You Can Do Hard Things

I have coached long enough to watch this happen hundreds of times. Someone walks in, convinced they cannot do a pull-up, cannot run a mile, cannot finish a workout without stopping. Then eventually they do. Not because we tricked them or because the workout was secretly easy. Because we put them in front of something difficult and stood there as they discovered they were capable of more than they had believed.

That experience does not stay in the gym. People who learn they can do hard physical things start applying that same evidence to the rest of their lives. The hard conversation at work. The difficult decision at home. The thing they have been avoiding for months. Once you have proof that you can push through discomfort and come out the other side, it gets harder to talk yourself out of things. That is not motivation. That is evidence, and evidence is the secret to success in life.

This is also why community in fitness is not a marketing angle; it is the mechanism. Hard things are easier to attempt and easier to repeat when you are not doing them alone. The person next to you on the floor, breathing just as hard, is not a small detail. It is the entire point.

Pull the Hard Lever

So here is the case I want to make, and it is a simple one. In a world that is racing to remove every form of friction from your life, go find some on purpose. Talk to someone instead of texting them. Carry the weight instead of inventing the next wheel. Show up to the gym instead of scrolling past it.

You are going to be offered the easy button constantly for the rest of your life, in every part of it. Most of the time, you should not take it. Not because hard is noble, but because hard is where the actual evidence of who you are gets built. Strength, confidence, connection, none of that gets manufactured. It gets earned, one rep and one hard conversation at a time.

The world is going to keep automating. That is not really up for debate anymore. What is still up to you is whether you stay human while it happens. Interact with people. Take care of yourself. Work hard at something that matters. Find the hard lever, and pull it.

See you in the gym.

—JG