Gym Theory: Death Drive

Nihilism, right-wing politics, self-sufficiency

Oil painting by Liza Sivakova (@liza_sivakova)

CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD.

Leftists frequently accuse the right-wing of running on pure death drive; I’ve seen some throw around the term (of course a made-up term, because leftists) omnicidal as a way to tie together right-wing projects of both genocide and ecocide. I took it for granted that this was an insult based on ideological difference, or, in other words, even should it reflect the reality of the situation, it was a reality that the Online Right would contest as ideology. But I think the Online Right is often blind to its own nihilism, always scapegoating it on the Left’s destruction of nature, the decadence of homosexuality and transgenderism, and the vulgarity of contemporary architecture. In Gothic Violence, Mike Ma dismisses the charge of nihilism against the Right as the whiny moralization of sincere observations. Nihilism is never something the Right generates itself.

Recently, I stumbled across a Substack of someone I attended a Bronze Age Mindset book club with a couple years back on a small, literature-based Discord server. On his Substack, this guy occasionally posts diary entries, and scrolling through his past month of entries was a dark journey; I altered some details to grant him anonymity, lest I’m accused of airing the dirty laundry of a truly damaged person. In his posts, he continued to suck off BAP, ranted about his own worthlessness using right-wing buzzwords, narrated a detailed rape fantasy in homage to Delicious Tacos, and said that he hopes that the Jews and the Palestinians eliminate each other, but especially that the Palestinians should die.

But at least, as a BAPist, lifting weights brings him a sense of vitality, he claims. In his eyes, it offers him a potential deliverance from being a fat retard. And yet I have trouble squaring vitality with the evidence of his depression and spiritual poverty; his articulations of his self-hatred turn far-right critiques of society against himself. It seems to me like lifting, for him, is just a religious rite performed at an unholy temple.

Sometimes I see men in their twenties online and think, There but for the grace of God go I. Or, I suppose, could have gone I. I’ve known the same feelings of depression, purposelessness, undesirability, self-hatred, and over-intellectualism that lead further and further into these nihilistic riptides. Despite his Underground Man posturing, this guy probably isn’t a bad person; he’s just broken. And what’s worse is that in the process of breaking, he’s no doubt systematically destroyed his belief in anything that could help him. Or simply the belief in recovery itself.

(Conspiracy theory: The pervasive anti-therapy and anti-SSRI sentiments among the Online Right are parts of its economic model; you wouldn’t pay a monthly subscription fee to Zero HP Lovecraft if you sincerely believed your life could get any better.) 

I’m not sure how you even help such people, though I believe they deserve help. In all likelihood, what they need isn’t the gym but some kind of ex-cult therapy. Getting offline isn’t sufficient. For one, it risks putting them into unbearable contact with the shittiness of their material lives. More troublingly, at some point, even if you’re offline, the online voices live in your head, and you try to prove yourself to them, going to the gym and dreaming up literary rape fantasies in their honor.

That’s parasocial hell.

Getting Your Shit Together™

Of course, a common fantasy of lifting is that it will help you get your shit together In The Real World. It teaches discipline and confidence, and to be fair, if you take it seriously, you do start to construct a lifestyle around it: prioritizing sleep, caring about nutrition, balancing your other life commitments to make time for training. Some go further. Lifting, as with everything that goes along with it, turns into an investment. That Andrew Tate should weld together having a gym-defined body and being a hustler merely makes explicit the libertarian logic of entrepreneurialism undergirding the worldview. The grindset can take you from the gym to the boardroom. It teaches responsibility—the one lesson Leftists don’t want you to learn. Without personal responsibility, you’re being denied the gateway between adolescence and proper manhood.

The difference between my former school gym and the locally-owned gym illustrates the political non-divide of this micro–culture war. At the university, the gym had posters about Cultivating Your Wellness 🌸. The local gym had posters that essentially said Stop Being Fat and Lazy 🤢. I understand the desire to escape neoliberal bullshit and the distaste some have for its infantilizing aesthetics. But let’s be clear: the alternative put forward to neoliberalism is just masculinized libertarianism, which is an alternative in affect and aesthetics but not in subjectivity. Wellness and self-care may chafe against strength and self-discipline, but both envision an end state of self-sufficiency—not stability but control. 

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the subjectivity neoliberalism produces the achievement subject, but “achievement” wrongly carries the implication of possible closure or finality. As Han points out in The Burnout Society, this subject is “incapable” of reaching its goals. Instead, it always strives, always heals, always cultivates, always counts its reps to failure. Lifting mostly eludes satisfying goals, especially in its current cultural configuration. It was easier back when lifting meant “getting a six-pack.” Now it’s the endless pursuit of discipline. Goal-oriented challenges like 75 Hard make explicit that lifting isn’t even the point—just the method for something deeper that you must always strive for but can never truly possess.

75 Hard describes itself as a “tactical guide to winning the war with yourself” through exercising, dieting, abstaining from alcohol, and taking daily selfies. The military framework, though, gestures toward the larger role that military fetishism takes within this ecosystem. You see in t-shirt designs and in the worship of figures such as David Goggins—a formerly obese kid who became a Navy SEAL and advocates for extreme mental toughness—that the goal is to develop oneself into a soldier. Not a rebel without a cause, but a soldier without a war. 

The fash question

A soldier without a war—yet. Unlike the rebel, the soldier doesn’t need a cause, only orders and the ability to carry them out. I don’t want to put a flashlight under my chin and talk about fascism. Jordan Castro deservedly mocks the fascist hysteria surrounding lifting culture, and yet a right-wing sensibility surely wends through gym culture and algorithms. In rereading The Burnout Society, I wonder whether Han isn’t too fast to declare that the disciplinary society has completely transformed into the achievement society. Han writes, 

The late-modern achievement subject does not pursue works of duty. Its maxims are not obedience, law, and the fulfillment of obligation, but rather freedom, pleasure, and inclination. Above all, it expects the profits of enjoyment from work. It works for pleasure and does not act at the behest of the Other.

You could say that the wannabe David Goggins out there are narcissists, living out personal fantasies of the days of imperial glory. But Han’s characterization doesn’t wholly convince me. The nostalgic attachment to duty, obedience, law (enforcement), and obligation remains alive. Is the libertarian ethos that is skeptical of freedom, pleasure, and inclination another end-state of the late-modern, narcissistic, achievement subject? Or is it the incubation state of a disciplinary subject waiting for the return of the Other to give it meaning? Is it, in short, a soldier waiting for his commander-in-chief? Does Han simply mistake the historical absence of a commander for the psychological eradication of its power and seduction?

After all, if a war comes, then the qualities that are the hallmarks of broken men are purified into virtues. Even fat retards have a shot at glory.

…But maybe this level of theoretical abstraction is too high for the subject matter.

Barbell goes up, barbell goes down.

As Castro notes, it’s easy to miss the humor and joy of lifting culture, especially in a moment that prizes hysteria and simmers with suspicion toward men. But his analysis, particularly of the right-wing strains within gym culture, reeks of Dimes Square bad faith. He’s correct that critics have a tendency to label anything not explicitly leftist—indeed, anything just normal or politically unaligned—as potentially or necessarily right wing, even fash. But he plays dumb when he considers the argument that the far-right has tried staking a claim to lifting culture—as though the figurehead for weightlifting in his well-documented social circle isn’t a guy who wrote a widely circulated book in praise of both barbells and “cleansing barbarism.” (🤦‍♂️) Castro instead dodges the complexity of the issue by immediately going into obesity and heart disease statistics. In fact, as the rest of his piece labors to explain, contra what pearl-clutching libs may believe about proto-fash gym bros, lifting has made him a nicer, calmer, and even holier person! QED, bro.

I’m sympathetic to Castro’s contention that lifting is more likely to ease your social anxiety disorder than serve meaningfully as political praxis. To put a fine point on it, I don’t think that lifting is fascist or body fascist or whatever. But I think that the nihilism the right wing both preys on and produces has become enmeshed in some stories we tell about the gym. I’m wary of the tendency for individuals to link their personal feelings of nihilism with a nihilistic worldview, creating a vicious cycle that’s both incredibly destructive and very hard to escape. But also, obesity affects more than two in five adults in the US. Furthermore, I’m a good person.

Gen Z nihilistic death cult

David Laid (left) v. Sam Sulek (right)

Let’s leave politics aside. There’s something to learn from the figures who captivate the online fitness community. Looking back on David Laid—the creative director at Gymshark and YouTube fitness influencer who reached his zenith in 2017 or so—seems to capture the millennial gym bro in some specific way: lean, fratty, and pretty. To be accurate, Laid is a zoomer himself (26 years old), but he is on the tail end of a millennial trend (Zyzz but for YouTube). Sam Sulek, a 21-year-old, roided-out bodybuilder from Ohio, is the new cause célèbre, attracting more takes than mires; his name is SEO gold. Sulek uploads daily long-form videos of his workouts and has become a symbol, maybe even scapegoat, for the Gen Z gym nihilist. 

Unlike Laid, Sulek isn’t even vaguely handsome. His muscles look grotesque; on Nymphet Alumni, a cohost aptly compared his physique to the Minotaur. Someone on /fit/ said it well: he doesn’t seem to be cycling steroids—just blasting them. He went from a competitive diver to his current form in two or three years. He eats something like 5,000 calories/day when he’s on a bulk, drinking chocolate milk straight from a jug and eating boxes of donuts to meet his goals. I find his videos hard to watch, especially because he still frets over his physique like a teenage boy doing sit-ups on his bedroom floor and then checking his abs in the mirror. Reminders of his youth hurt, because you know he’s playing fast and loose with the real possibility of early death.

The people who comment on his videos remark on Sulek’s virtues: his passion, his calm voice, his life advice. But I can’t help but feel that they’re waiting for him to become the next Mac Miller, Juice WRLD, or XXXTentacion. Gen Z likes a suicide. They like the victim who remains morally pure, snapped up by their own demons even as they tried to preach against them to their flocks. But I’m reminded of a point Brace Belden made once on TrueAnon: when worshippers gather around you, don’t think you’re their god when you’re actually their sacrifice.

I have only seen a couple of Sulek’s videos, but he features heavily in the clips you see circulating on TikTok and Instagram Reels. The story they tell of him is that he dated a girl in high school who broke his heart, which, in turn, broke him, setting him on this death spiral. The ethos: Fuck it, I’ll die young. I’m not sure how much of this narrative is true; the viral video that makes this case uses a photo of Sulek in high school standing next to a young woman whom it implies was his girlfriend but whom others say is actually his sister. Again, the fantasy is more instructive than the reality. It’s a story that has become a meme: heartbreak, breakdown, gym. These videos turn the gym into a form of self-harm—the male alternative to girls who post photos of their cut-up wrists on Tumblr. I’m here because I suffer. I’m here because I don’t believe in anything anymore.

The fallen world

Hard times create rock-hard men—that’s how that meme goes, right? Inherited messages about the gym have a religio-capitalist dimension to them: “no pain, no gain,” “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” “pain is weakness leaving the body.” Pain was the price of strength or purity. But in the case of Sulek, even with all his muscle, it’s hard to see redemption on the other side of pain—only a death I deeply hope he’s spared.

Sulek is a limit case, to be sure. But the aesthetics of pain, whether in good or bad faith, seems to convey an emotional truth about life in a story, in a system, where the winner takes all and the losers can always lose more. This story offers only two roles: either the unlikely victor or the undeserving victim. For the narcissist, that’s a good bargain, win-win. For everyone else, that’s a reason to fear weakness. To count your reps till failure.

Physique update

Still mid.