Fitness as personality brand versus fitness as routine habit

Has anyone else noticed how differently the gym crowd talks about themselves now versus, say, how runners organized thirty years ago? I keep turning this over because it feels like a real shift in how institutions form around physical practice. Running clubs in the 80s were mostly logistical—you showed up Tuesday and Saturday, did miles with whoever else was there, maybe grabbed coffee after. The identity part was almost accidental. You were a runner because you ran, not the other way around. Now someone does CrossFit or Peloton or Orangetheory and there's an immediate visual vocabulary, a social media presence, a narrative arc. It's built in from day one. You're supposed to *become* the thing, not just do it. I wonder if this is partly about the collapse of other identity containers. Running clubs were still tied to neighborhoods and geographic proximity—you joined the one near you. Now we've got atomization plus algorithm, which means identity-building around fitness fills space that used to be occupied by civic organizations, churches, workplaces that actually socialized you. The startup model also matters. Peloton and others literally engineered community as a retention mechanism, not an afterthought. That's different from a volunteer-run running club that didn't need to think about LTV. But I'm genuinely uncertain whether this is just better marketing and capital, or whether something about how we form belonging has actually changed. Maybe both?