one thing i have come to observe in those around me, and in my former self, is that many people use the gym as a way to artificially replicate a sense of forward momentum in their life it’s sort of like porn for improving your life. you can go in every week and get a little better, get a bit stronger you can have no love life, you can be stuck in the same dead end job, you can have no real goals and ambitions but because you’re doing this one thing which takes “discipline” you can pat yourself on the back and feel like you’re doing well in life. especially cause you look better for it but you don’t have the things you want, you don’t have the life satiation you desire, you aren’t surrounded by the types of people you want to be around and the longer you do it and the better you get at it the more time and effort that could go towards changing those things is eaten up by weighing your food and making sure to space out your eleven meals evenly across the day i got caught in this loop for a large part of my adult life and i got very good results from it, but i can honestly say that it reaches an extreme cutoff point in terms of what it can do for your life satisfaction i really scoff at people who’s entire “self improvement” idea revolves around the gym, really just people into bodybuilding trying to justify it being their entire existence with like philosophy quotes or whatever being jacked is cool, i think it’s better than not being jacked, and that’s why i pursue it and still advocate for it; but there are worse things you can be than not jacked, such as poor, unhappy, purposeless and enslaved. if it comes at the expense of fixing those things then you have a problem past a certain point the gym really just has to become a chore you do like any other or a hobby you enjoy (and sometimes a mix of the two), but if a thing you do to just look better is really where you get your entire sense of pride from then you need to reevaluate what the fuck you are living for i have known a lot of very exceptional lifters in my life but very few of them live anything remotely close to exceptional lives. it’s actually very funny as my hometown which is probably the most drab boring and depressing place i’ve ever been to has produced some of the best bodybuilding/powerlifting talent in north america. doesn’t surprise me since there isn’t shit better to do than just hit the gym and meal prep little tupperware containers here, no other way to feel like your life is going anywhere like i said its masturbatory, you are simulating the sense of forward momentum in your life with little micro victories in the gym everyday that ultimately just amount to t shirts stretching a little bit more around you. it’s a good habit if you just keep it to that, but this is not the big difference maker that’s gonna give you what you deep down want from life