The Unbearable Lightness of Lightness

Faith in Iron: Why the Value of Lifting Only Reveals Itself After You Leap

I miss it so much.

Over the summer, I was forced into an involuntary break from the gym due to surgical complications. And I’ve been closely observing the effects it had on me. I mean, I had to.

As expected, I lost muscle mass, gained fat, look worse, and feel worse. I suspect that much of my diminished appearance stems less from the physical changes themselves than from the way I feel just so much worse, and healthy people pick up on this immediately.

While I normally calculate the rate of muscle gained or fat lost, the mind now turns to its dark inverse: the rate of fat gained, the rate of muscle lost, or simply this uneasy, restless awareness of my body yielding to entropy in the absence of countervailing effort.

The feeling reaches beyond falling short of my fitness goals, it touches existential themes of decay instead of growth, lack of meaning without actions that tie directly to what is good and matters, and a sense of imminent death and mortality from extrapolating the direction I’m heading in. That is what emotions do: they anticipate the future, given present sensory input and one’s own actions. In this state, even my outlook on the world is altered. The objective facts remain unchanged, yet the first-person phenomenology of being-in-the-world grows duller, and reality itself seems drained of vitality and meaning.

Exactly. Now imagine weeks. Months.

I am not just less good-looking; I genuinely believe I’ve become a worse person in just a few weeks, morally speaking. I am less agentic, less optimistic, and my character feels diminished. Where I was mostly agreeable and gentle just some weeks ago, I now notice a sharper impulse to lash out at others in response to my own misery. I can still restrain it, but the resentful voices have grown louder.

Worse still, I no longer even feel fully human, or at least not like a Mensch, the Yiddish word that means not only “person” but also “a person of integrity and honor.”

I feel like a different species, an inferior one, and I don't like it one bit.

I don’t want to be around people, I don’t want to be seen, and I certainly don’t want to be touched. Paradoxically, the more I care for someone, the less I want to be near them right now. Imagine loving someone and offering them whatever this is. Yikes. What a grim gift. My very image in their eyes becomes a burden in itself.

Kundera talks about this, how love is inescapably triangular: you, the beloved, and the ideal image of you in the eyes of the beloved. To be fair, love tends to also be triangular in less philosophical ways, but he isn’t wrong.

And amusingly, alongside this theme of the burdensome image of the self in the beloved’s mind, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera circles back to the great existential polarity of lightness and heaviness, a tension that feels especially apt while I’m left without the literal heaviness of iron in my hands.

To live lightly is to move without burden, to seize pleasure, to treat life as play. Yet this very lightness, while promising freedom, also carries ephemerality and insignificance; it crushes not with weight but with the absence of meaning, leaving life feeling empty and trivial.

To live with heaviness, by contrast, is to feel that one’s choices matter, that one is bound by love, duty, history, or fate. Heaviness brings weight, rootedness, and responsibility. It can suffocate, constrain, even entrap, yet it can remain more bearable precisely because it is filled with meaning.

Nowhere is this paradox between lightness and heaviness more vividly embodied than in strength training. When you begin to lift heavy, you realize much of life’s so-called heaviness was only your own weakness. The heavier you lift, the lighter it feels to inhabit the body and the world. Neglect the weights in pursuit of a “lighter” life, and existence itself grows heavier. Once you have experienced the transformation of lifting heavy, the pure lightness of lightness reveals itself as the most unbearable weight of all. The heavy is the road to the light. Not only in the sense of lightness, but also in the sense of light as the most universal symbol of what transcends us spiritually; the divine.

One of my goals this year was to formally join a wisdom tradition. I considered returning to Christianity, perhaps even to the Catholicism I grew up with, and I visited services across different denominations. In the words of C. S. Lewis I only arrived at a mere Christianity, which is like standing in a great hall or corridor with many doors opening into different rooms. The corridor is not meant to be a permanent dwelling place; it is the place from which one chooses which door to enter. The “rooms” are the particular traditions or denominations. Yet the integrity of my heart and conscience, themselves deeply Christian ideals, prevents me from taking the decisive step. To convert requires confessing certain beliefs I know I do not actually hold. And so my spiritual foundation remains groundless, as Buddhism reminds us it always already does.

Still, amid all this spiritual uncertainty, I find one point of clarity: the eternal return to the barebell. I must lift. The heavy is the road to the light. I will have to write more about this another time.

What strikes me is that from my current fallen state, having slipped out of the workout routine out of necessity, I can scarcely believe in the possibility of standing on the other side again. It feels too miraculous, too good to be true. All of this while I know every variable I need to control to return to that embodied paradise.

Just over two months ago, and it feels like a different person. Different species.

I have gone in and out of it before; I know the path back in remains open. I know I will regain a six-pack in no time. Actually, I could even sit down and calculate with precision how long each milestone will take me, if executed properly. None of it is hard, it’s simple, just not easy. Rationally, I am certain: soon I will look jacked again and feel immeasurably better. But emotionally, I find it immensely difficult to experience this certainty as real. Beyond the veil of resuming a proper workout regimen lies not only a different phenomenological horizon but even a different moral world. I know this, but the knowledge isn’t felt. What is needed to cross the abyss between here and there is much closer to faith.

If I, as an experienced lifter and licensed bodybuilding coach, struggle to imagine the transformation from my current state, how much harder must it be for someone who has never once felt it?

This makes me reflect on who I was before I ever touched a barbell, and on those who have not (yet) taken up the habit. How are they to decide to begin, without any way of grasping just how profoundly it will divide their lives into before and after?

I always urge people to take up strength training, because its significance reaches far beyond superficial markers like body fat percentage (though, of course, only the shallow don’t judge by appearances). The transformative power of lifting weights can hardly be overstated. Yet if you have never experienced it, you simply cannot understand how deep it cuts. It belongs to that rare category of practices where, once someone has truly begun, they look back with a kind of stunned recognition, sometimes even with tears in their eyes, and say:

“Oh, that’s what you meant.”

“I get it now.”

“I couldn’t see it before.”

The truth is, they could not have been persuaded of its value until they had first become the kind of person capable of perceiving it. Philosophy classifies these as a special kind of decision-problem: situations where the significance cannot be grasped until after a deep transformation has occurred exactly through taking that course of action. In such cases, reason alone is insufficient. What is required at the outset is something closer to faith, or what philosophers call proleptic reasons, or proleptic rationality.

As Agnes Callard argues, such reasons are indispensable whenever we commit to a pursuit before we can fully access its value. We begin in recognition of a defect or a lack in our own perception of what matters and can matter, an awareness that something is missing in our grasp of a value. Only by leaping, by submitting ourselves to a transformative practice or course, does that value gradually disclose itself. If you have never lifted weights, the decision to begin strength training belongs to what philosophers call “vampire problems.” You cannot evaluate its importance in advance, because it will change who you are in ways you can only understand after the transformation has taken place.

In her work on transformative experience, L. A. Paul argues that the classical rational-choice model of decision-making fails for certain options. Rational choice assumes you can gather information about alternatives and then select the one that best fits your existing preferences and values. But some experiences alter the person experiencing and their values so profoundly that the model no longer applies.

The thought experiment of assessing whether you should want to become a vampire is such a fictional problem, as you cannot know in advance what it is like to be a vampire. Even asking other vampires is not helpful, as their outlook on their decision is shaped by their new way of being and by having made the decision. In real life, the decision to have children is such a case. You don’t simply acquire a child; you become something you have never been before—a mother or a father. And you cannot fully know what that is like until after the fact.

Now that I’ve been somewhat transformed back, I’d argue that becoming a person who regularly lifts weights belongs squarely in this category of decision-problems. Even having undergone the transformation before, I can barely believe in its gravity right now, yet I know it to be true.

Maybe we should call it the buff-vampire problem, because, once again, the difference in being-in-the-world is as radical as becoming another species, or even a mythological one.

If I was a vampire and I really liked it so much that I’d think you ought to become one, too, I’d just bite you to help you out of your misery.

But with the gym, no one can do it for you. You have to choose, and you have to go.

I wish I could hold your hand here and explain this gently. But, as I admitted earlier, my own moral character is grossly undermined by the humiliation of my current physical state. I don’t know how to close with a wholesome, polished conclusion. So instead, if you’re still a non-gym goer, imagine my hands uncomfortably gripping into your shoulders, my nose wrinkled in disgust, my face turning red as I try to stay composed, voice cracking, hands shaking, then the words forming: GO. LIFT. HEAVY. WEIGHTS. You can feel some saliva landing on your face.

Nevermind. This isn’t me at all.

I urge you to have faith and give it a go. Its absence in my own life right now teaches me more than ever how much it is worth it to yearn for the iron. Ideally, worship it daily. Please, just start. Start with building some consistency, a small number of times of lifting per week. Don’t overthink it. Don’t buy fancy equipment. Don’t think about supplements. Just start.

If you lack any other proleptic reason, then do it for me. I miss it so much.