One of the consequences of youth culture is that there is not a lot of thought put into the fitness of old people. What little there is on the subject is either aimed at peddling drugs or peddling the crackpot idea that you are as young as you feel. The former looks at the swelling population of geezers the same way they looked at Covid. They are just looking for a way to steal more money. The latter tends to promote activities that have dubious fitness benefits and mostly sell good vibes.

The main reason for this is Americans are terrible at being old. The obsession with youth is a core part of the culture. Every political cycle, billions of words are wasted on what the youth have to say about things, as if being young makes you wise and smart, when in reality you are at your dumbest when young. Of course, young people are encouraged to set new trends and then old people are encouraged to adopt those trends so they can pretend to be young.

This was not always the way. For most of human history, youth was a thing humans were quickly ushered through so that they could become productive members of the family and community. Once children could do useful things, they were put on a course to learn to be an adult. In the modern age, it is the reverse. Once someone hits the age of majority, they are put on a course to maintain the illusion of perpetual youth in order to avoid thinking much about what comes after youth.

The thing is though, you will spend most of your life living outside of your physical prime, so preparing for it and maximizing that time should be important. The old Mickey Mantle joke about how if he knew he would live as long as he did, he would have taken better care of himself was funny because it is true. Good fitness habits in the twenties and thirties are what make for good health in the middle years possible. Good habits in the middle years are what set up productive later years.

Instead of a fitness culture aimed at maximizing fitness over the long arc of your life, the focus is on unrealistically preserving youth. Gyms profit from people hoping to attain a physique that they never had in their youth and probably never would have attained in their youth if they tried their best. In their post-youth they are struggling and failing to attain a goal that makes no sense. Worst of all are the weight trainers who strive to look like Greek statues, so they can post shirtless pics on Twitter.

Years ago, a smart guy named Mark Rippetoe wrote a book titled Starting Strength, in which he laid out his scheme for basic weight training. It remains a classic in the weight training world as it explains all of the important exercises and how they strengthen specific muscle groups. It made a lot of money for him, but it would have been better if it were called Ending Strength. The reason is the point of exercise in general is to extend the useful years of your body to the furthers possible limit.

The proposition with regards to fitness is quite simple. If you are thirty years old, would you trade a few years of looking buff right now for not being able to climb stairs in the final ten years of your life. Sadly, most thirty-year-olds would go with looking buff, but no fifty-year-old worried about such an outcome would take that deal. Yet, that is the way fitness culture is structured and the thumb is on the scale to encourage people to take the buff option, long after buff is plausible.

You can probably blame this on the boomers as the obsession with perpetual youth started with that generation. Prior to the post-war years, youth culture was limited to jazz clubs and the degenerates who frequented them. In fairness, boomers did not invent youth culture, but they embraced it, and they still embrace it. Every potion, product and promotion are sold to them as the fountain of youth. It will not be long before lifestyle companies are claiming eighty is the new thirty.

The thing is though, eighty can be a better eighty, if all along the arc of life the person is encouraged to do the things that pay those dividends in old age. Regular weight training in the middle years with the goal of maintaining muscle mass will mean climbing the stairs when you are eighty rather than buying a stair lift. Functional exercise aimed at maintaining cardiovascular capacity in your thirties will mean being able to walk the museum with your grandchildren.

Of course, the reason no one tries to sell a program like this to middle aged people is the target audience fears old age more than death, so anything that reminds them that they will one day be old is a no sale. Still, it seems like there could be some audience for a program that focuses on extended quality years. The typical white person in American is in his fifties. This is a guy thinking about how many quality years he has left and what he can do with them.

That is the warping power of youth culture and a good example of what happens when the wrong people gain cultural power. Peddling potions and programs that promise to make you look young and buff is good for the sort of people who work at card tables in temporary offices where all the cars in the parking lot are left running in case they have to make a quick escape. They do not care about the long-term health of the population, just the short-term profit to be gained from them.

In a way, fitness is a microcosm for the current crisis in that it focuses all of the attention on the here and now, usually on unattainable or pointless goals, without thinking about what comes around the next bend. Most of what ails present day America is the result of not thinking at all about the second order effects of present actions. Youth culture has created a population with no sense of time. Instead of building something to last, it aims for living fast and leaving behind a good-looking corpse.

What this suggests is that the antidote to what ails us in this age is the rejection of youth culture and the short-term thinking that comes with it. Instead of maximizing the moment, the focus must be on ending strength. The long arc of life, politics and the culture is to be the best at the end rather than the beginning. People who live with the end in mind have full lives and a culture full of such people is one that avoids the present troubles and endeavors to sustain itself for the long haul.

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