The fitness-as-identity thing might not be as new as we think

I'd push back slightly on the "same proportion" claim. I taught high school for six years, and what I'm seeing now with fitness culture among teenagers is qualitatively different from what I remember from my own adolescence in the 90s. Not because the obsession level is higher—plenty of kids were gym-rat types back then—but because the *frictionlessness* actually does change behavior in ways I don't think are purely visibility. An 80s runner had to physically show up. That created a natural ceiling on how much time you could invest, and it forced you into a social context whether you wanted it or not. The diner conversation happened whether you were chatty or not. Now I watch students spend three hours a day on fitness apps and communities, and the lack of friction means they can customize away every single social element except the leaderboard. They can have complete identity immersion without ever having an awkward conversation with a stranger. I think that actually selects for different personality types and reinforces obsessive patterns more efficiently than the old model did. The distribution network isn't just making the same phenomenon visible—it's removing the brakes that kept it bounded. That doesn't mean the identity-first devotee ratio was higher before. It means the infrastructure was worse at satisfying that impulse, so fewer people ended up in deep. Now they can scratch that itch completely without leaving home.

You're right that we're probably confusing visibility for novelty, but I'd push back slightly on the "same proportion" claim. The decoupling you describe isn't just a communications upgrade—it changes the selection mechanism. In the 80s running club model, you had natural friction that filtered for certain types of people. You needed geographic proximity, schedule alignment, tolerance for group dynamics, willingness to show up consistently in weather. That self-selected for a particular temperament. The modern setup removes most of that friction but introduces different kinds: you need discipline to maintain alone, susceptibility to quantified feedback loops, comfort with asynchronous community. These select for different psychological profiles, and I'd bet there are genuinely more of them. Not because humans changed, but because the activity now fits people who would've never made it to the diner. The identity-first devotee in 1985 was genuinely constrained by physical infrastructure in ways that shaped what "fitness identity" could even look like. You couldn't be a runner without also being *a person who shows up*. Now you can construct it around metrics, aesthetic, comparison, narrative—without that accountability mechanism. Whether that's more or less stable as identity, I'm genuinely uncertain. But I suspect the pool is larger because you've removed the friction that once screened out a whole segment. The network effect is real, but it might be amplifying something that was already there rather than creating it from nothing.

I'd push back on the "same proportion" claim—or at least the assumption that visibility just reveals pre-existing preference distribution. The infrastructure change you're describing isn't neutral. It actually reshapes who gets attracted to fitness identity in the first place. An 80s running club had hard constraints: geographic proximity, scheduling synchronization, the social tax of showing up. These filtered for a certain type of person—genuinely local commitment, some baseline social comfort, willingness to embed in an existing group culture. The leaderboard economy removes those filters. Now you can be a fitness-identity person without any of those frictions. That's not just making the existing people visible; it's lowering the activation energy enough to pull in people who never would've joined a club. The proportion of identity-first fitness people probably *is* actually higher now, because the marginal cost of joining is different. The trickier part: I suspect this also changes *what kind* of identity sticks. A running club demanded some integration with local social life—you couldn't be a pure fitness identity, you had to be "the guy who runs." The app lets you be pure signal, pure metrics, pure aesthetic. That's selecting for a different phenotype of commitment. So the growth isn't just documentation of the same thing; the constraints themselves shaped which motivations were viable. Remove them and you get different people, not just more visible people.