Meaningful Returns

Being healthy is very important, first of all, so please don’t read this and go away telling everyone that Jared Korver is breathing lies and contributing to America’s health problems.

But I have a story to tell:

I once joined, on a trial basis, a gym that I will not name, but that is similar to Crossfit in the sorts of exercise that it promotes. I have nothing but great things to say about the workouts and the people at this gym who coached us through them. I mean, you can argue all you want with the obnoxiousness that sometimes surrounds these sorts of gyms, but it’s tough to argue with the results. It just works.

But something about these gyms (and others, like the barre ones and the cycling ones and the ones where you aren’t allowed to workout without lululemon clothes or some article of clothing that says “WOD” on it somewhere)–something about them is that they’re usually expensive. And I want to be very careful about that word expensive. But what I mean is that they cost thousands of dollars a year to be a part of.

Well, at the end of this trial membership (which I had been very happy about), there came the dreaded meeting with one of the coaches about joining full time, and I dreaded it not because I didn’t want to join full time, but because I knew full well that I couldn’t afford it. And in this meeting the coach asked me a very tricky question. He said, “Jared, would you put a dollar amount on the value of your health?”

And of course on the one hand, health is invaluable, because, come on! We live in our bodies, don’t we? The health of our bodies, then, is in a sense “invaluable” and so the answer was no, I would NOT put a dollar amount on it! But on the other hand, I definitely could not justify spending more than $3,000 annually on this gym membership, no matter how awesome it was and how much benefit I gained from it. And believe me, I tried for several weeks to justify it internally and with my wife. We turned over all sorts of rocks looking for a few hundred extra bucks each month. But they just weren’t there.

I think there are two lessons here:

1. “Healthy” is perhaps the most complex concept we face as humans, because it encompasses all of the facets of what it means to be human. Being a healthy human isn’t only (perhaps not even primarily) about our bodies, though many of us have forgotten that. You can become very unhealthy by being overly healthy. Does that make sense? So, though I would have loved this gym because it would have gotten my body back to the physical shape it was in when I could do cool white-guy dunks on a basketball court and all of that, it would have detracted from several other facets of my overall health. This is simply a word of caution, that our physical health can sometimes come at a cost that transcends dollars and cents.
2.  Expensive is relative. I think I’m of the opinion that this is probably true only up to certain points, but for now let’s just go with it. Some people can and even should pay $3,000 annually for a gym membership, but some people definitely shouldn’t, whether they can or not. This is a weird reality of money and humanity, but I don’t make the rules.

Anyways, stay healthy, fully healthy, everyone.