You feel the pain, you feel the anxiety, you understand the impossibility of moving like this forever -- the drudgery, gradually fatiguing muscles, smell of rank sweat, and then the workout ends. You feel a wave of relief wash over and all your senses feel switched on. You can feel your body, your thoughts, breath normalising, and muscles regaining their states. A much needed shock to your way of life. Exercise is a means to an end; it makes you feel human, and then your selective amnesia starts. The human state of apathy switches on.
From your car window, you see a dirty disgusting human skeleton walking down the road in tattered clothes, talking to himself, picking up garbage in his plastic sack for his next hit (maybe next meal), and you resume your Instagram scrolling and chronic posting.
You see a dog with a missing eye, maggots, puss, bloody gash, no fur, dragging his wounds, and you resume your chai fuckaccino latte, and do a hahaha with your equally miserable friends.
You lean into your chair at 9:30 a.m., open your laptop, and realise that you need to work like a drone till 7 p.m. in this simulation, just to afford your borderline insane lifestyle which you will invariably complain about to everyone but you can never leave.
You see your dark dirty maid, smelly uncouth driver, below minimum wage house help not giving their 100% to the job you so benevolently provided, and you lash out like your slave needs to be whipped, and as if you have never slacked at work.
You continue with your endless self-aggrandizing, borderline narcissistic, almost psychotic day and go to sleep, all huffing and puffing.
But then you wake up and exercise. You give yourself a voluntary shock out of the apathy. You again feel the pain and physical effort, you feel the horror, you feel how tough it is being a human, the sheer relentlessness and force needed to march on day-in and day-out, and in between you sometimes realise how easy you have it and what an arrogant little cunt you've transformed into. This pain makes you human, it tries to reconnect you to humanity's frailties and meaningless existence, but you forget as soon as you stop, and default into your idiotic and self-absorbed routine. Bitching, moaning, and throwing tantrums like a 5 year old. The dehumanised soulless meat puppet who wears a mask and smells indifference instead of air for 23 hours, except for the 1 hour of sweating.
That is exercise. It shocks you to help, but it can't help a lost cause.
- Aman Yadav
