Do I Look the Part?
The Male Body Lie
I would have looked all right in the 90s. These days I get derided in the comments section for being skinny or “sarcopenic.”
It started with a glitch of my AI art bot. It forgot who Shirtless Simon and Jumbo the Cat were and generated something obscene. No, not in that way, but instead of a white‑haired, lean Simon I got a dark-haired young gym‑bro with a likewise dark (and clearly evil) cat. Huge chest, bulging deltoids, wide torso. When I rewired the bot’s rusted memory, restored Simon (and Jumbo) and placed the two images side by side, the contrast was stark. And I thought it’s a perfect snapshot of what’s been happening in the male‑physique department for the past six‑plus decades. What used to be exceptional, even freakish, is now a baseline. Pity the young men.
Physique inflation
When I was a young boy I saw the Bruce Lee films. His physique looked extraordinary. He was fast, lean, and exceptionally defined but still very much human. You could imagine him walking around somewhere in the world, wearing normal clothes, doing normal things.
By the time I was finishing high school, things started to change. The Terminator hit the big screens as well as other Arnold vehicles. They helped to move body building from the freak-show margins into the mainstream. In the nineties it was still Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club that captured the imagination as the male ideal. But not long after that the dam broke. The social media came on stage and flooded us with one endless, inflating, comparison feed. And what were once outliers, stopped being perceived as such. Arnold was never normal, yet he was normalised. Everyone below that new reference point started feeling inadequate, unfinished, and behind.
The Damage
We are always a product of our era* and we’re brought up with those images that are considered “normal”. We try, and we inevitably fail to get anywhere close. We get discouraged and, because of the “all or nothing” mentality, we frequently quit the physical development and muscle building effort in its totality. Why bother training if “normal” already looks impossible? I fell into that category too for a while.
Others do the opposite. They chase the image at all costs: ego lifting, ignoring pain and training like recovery does not matter. Injuries make sure that that type of training eventually stops too.
Then there is the problem of…
The Game You Didn’t Agree to Play
There is something we’re not told as young men about today’s male body ideal. Shall we call it “pharmaceutical assistance”? Once that’s spelled out clearly, a lot of confusion and cognitive dissonance goes away. It becomes clear why you can work out and push yourself like the greats, but get nothing but injuries for your troubles. Rick Gervais made this great joke at the Golden Globes in 2022: “Have we got an award for the most ripped junkie? No. No point. We know who’d win that.” If you know the game is rigged you can refuse to play. But only if you know.
As people get older and cling to these ridiculously inflated ideals, things get tragic and comical at once. They disengage early as they can no longer reasonably hope for that picture they were chasing.
Here is my take on it. There is another way. The Arnold body was impressive for a moment, but the Bruce Lee physique is impressive across decades.
Leaner and more capable, not bigger.
An Anthropological Perspective**
Our physiology is shaped by what our ancestors needed to do to survive. We’re not designed to carry massive amounts of muscle. We traded the pursuit of raw strength for larger brains. Hunter-gatherers trained to hunt and gather not to puff themselves on Instagram. Warriors were valued for stamina, precision and usefulness to the group.
You can see that in the ancient Greek statues. These bodies look capable, not ballooned out of proportion. You can imagine them running, throwing or wrestling, and sometimes they are portrayed in those actions. Today, the only action most fitness influencers see is preening to the camera.
Let’s tell the young generation the truth. Today’s bullshit ideal is not an absolute, timeless norm. It’s recent, local and extremely fragile.
Opting Out, but What Instead?
So you’ve awakened. You know the ideal is false, now what? Rejecting it does not mean rejecting all effort. It means changing the rules. For yourself, because you have to let the society be, for now.
I “converted” myself to fitness after 40. The benefits are real and the costs in effort are much lower than you’ve been led to believe. The changes I’ve experienced over the last 10 years were very subtle. My weight hardly altered. But my body composition must have. I’m visibly more muscular, and people notice this when at the beach or in other shirtless settings. But with clothes on, I look regular. And the real change is in how I feel and what I can do. And I can do a lot of stuff and they are all fun! Which brings me closer to the Bruce Lee end of the spectrum. Not bigger, but better.
I’m an outlier today, but I wouldn’t be in antiquity.
The real harm of the physique inflation is that it turns you against your own body. It becomes something you have to coerce and drug into submission to get it to look like that fake ideal. And that never ends well. The pile of injured bodies is mounting.
I propose another metric. How about we measure success by how useful your body will be to your future self in 10, 20 or 30 years time? Things are so much more clear when you take the long view; because what good are likes today if you’ll have trouble getting out of bed in 5 years time? It makes sense to be kind to yourself and not try to impress strangers.
Pity the young men, but more importantly, let’s give them a way out.
What I’m doing, and why
I am an anthropologist turned fitness YouTuber, and my work focuses on something most of the fitness world gets wrong: how to build strength and flexibility without surrendering your life to the gym, and without breaking yourself in the process.
The course I have built is shaped by long-term thinking about our bodies, minds, and habit formation. It is designed for people who want to stay capable for decades.
Supporters on Buy Me a Coffee get access to the beta version. This is early access to the system while it is still being refined, before it is packaged and priced and released to the world at large. If my way of thinking resonates with you, this is the moment to step inside.
To those who already support my work, thank you. You are backing a model of fitness that refuses to accept frailty as the default. It’s an alternative to the Fitness Dark Ages we’re currently living through.
Asterisks
*Philosophically, as Heidegger points out it is our job as humans to overcome this “throwness” (being thrown into our time and culture and taking it as “normal”).
**Thanks to Vann Cunningham for exchange of ideas that fuelled this section.
I loved the Golden Globes with Ricky Gervais!😂👍🏼
If I remember the story correctly, the Terminator isn't supposed to be a human but a cyborg. That's why Arnold fit the part. He's supposed to look somewhat unreal.