The Evolution of Strength: From Labor to Lifestyle
Throughout most of human history, physical strength required no branding or marketing. If an individual possessed thick wrists, a heavy gait, or a back slightly curved forward, one could reasonably assume their day involved demanding physical tasks. Fields needed tilling, stones required moving, and timber had to be cut and carried. The body naturally recorded these requirements through its form and function.
Being muscular—what contemporary society might label as "shredded" or simply "looking hot"—was never an end goal in itself. Instead, it emerged as a natural byproduct of essential work that needed completion. Physical prowess was intrinsically linked to profession and survival, with one's physique serving as a visible ledger of their daily labor.
The Post-Industrial Transformation of Physicality
In our current post-industrial world, this physical record has become entirely elective. Broad shoulders now belong as frequently to someone who spends their day before a computer screen as to someone who moves freight for a living. The once-direct connection between physique and profession has significantly loosened, making it impossible to accurately read a person's trade through their posture alone.
The most sculpted bodies in modern cities are often constructed in climate-controlled rooms under fluorescent lighting, lifting stainless steel weights that serve no purpose beyond being lifted. We run on treadmills that carry us nowhere physically, yet everywhere metaphorically in our pursuit of fitness.
This new fitness culture hums with its own ecosystem: protein shakes consumed from matte-black bottles, heart rates and calories monitored on wearable screens, macronutrients tracked with almost devotional precision, and compression fabrics worn like specialized uniforms. An entire subculture has developed around supplements, powders, and optimization metrics that would have been foreign to previous generations.
When Effort Becomes Aesthetic
We now speak casually about "putting in the work" even when our professional careers leave no physical marks on our bodies. Effort has transformed into an aesthetic pursuit rather than a practical necessity. The end product is no longer timber, stone, or steel—it is the body itself, treated as a continuous optimization project under perpetual refinement.
The Treadmill Economy and Speculative Futures
In a landscape where gyms already operate as commercial ecosystems—complete with monthly subscriptions, branded supplements, premium membership tiers, personal trainers, and influencer discount codes—it requires little imagination to envision this exertion being channeled toward more "productive" purposes. If thousands of bodies are already burning energy on polished studio floors each morning, why not capture and convert those calories into electricity?
The technical feasibility of such systems can be debated separately. As historical optimism reminds us through Plato's "necessity is the mother of invention" and George Herbert's "where there's a will, there's a way," humanity has consistently reorganized labor, redrawn borders, built cities in deserts, and fashioned computer chips from sand and stone when circumstances demanded innovation.
Throughout history, societies have accepted harsher systems with thinner justifications. At minimum, one might imagine that such an arrangement would leave participants remarkably fit. Setting aside questions about potential servitude to machines, individuals would likely exceed their fitness goals under such circumstances.
A Near-Future Scenario: 2030 and Beyond
Now project this concept into a near future, perhaps around 2030, where automation has absorbed 80% of traditional jobs, leaving billions of people economically redundant yet still requiring income and, perhaps more importantly, purpose. What universal credential remains when most professions have disappeared? Limbs that can move. A body capable of exertion. In a fragmented labor market, this becomes the one qualification nearly everyone still possesses.
This idea has gained traction not through academic papers but through a forty-second AI-generated video that presents the concept with more seriousness than satire typically allows. The video features hyper-realistic versions of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman—appearing five years older—seated together as co-founders of a fictional venture called Energym.
The Energym Proposition
Their company's proposition is straightforward: if AI systems and robotics have displaced most forms of employment, let humans generate electricity through exercise and feed it back into the infrastructure that replaced them. Pay them for this exertion. Frame it, as the Altman avatar describes, as a solution that "solved our need for energy and your need for purpose"—positioning it as recruitment rather than redundancy.
The pitch recognizes an unspoken truth: money alone cannot resolve the void created by mass unemployment. Without work, days lose their structure and meaning. Even affluent but unmoored individuals—like the familiar television trope of a spouse left alone after their partner leaves for work and children depart for school—illustrate how material provision does not equal purpose. Work has long functioned as proof of usefulness, however imperfectly. Remove it, and something more destabilizing than income disappears.
The Energym concept seizes on this inversion. If millions are no longer required for traditional labor yet still seek the structure and validation that work once provided, exercise can be recoded as employment. Install generators in fitness equipment. Let human exertion produce electricity that feeds the AI data centers which rendered their previous careers obsolete.
Echoes of Black Mirror: Fifteen Million Merits
Anyone familiar with the British dystopian anthology series Black Mirror will immediately recognize this structure. The series' second episode, "Fifteen Million Merits," presents an enclosed world where people spend their days cycling on stationary bikes to generate electricity. These bikes power a vast, screen-saturated complex where they also live, with no visible life beyond it.
In exchange, riders earn "merits"—a digital currency used to purchase food, basic necessities, and small digital luxuries that make confinement more bearable. Each person inhabits a small grey room lined entirely with screens, lacking conventional windows. Advertisements interrupt constantly, with attempts to avoid them triggering piercing alarms and merit deductions. Attention is strictly enforced.
Identity itself becomes mediated through digital avatars called "Doppels" (short for doppelgängers), which function as individuals' stand-ins throughout this enclosed world. Riders spend hard-earned merits customizing these avatars with new hair, clothing, and accessories—cosmetic upgrades that signal status within a system offering little else.
Social Stratification and False Escapes
The society is rigidly stratified. Those fit enough to pedal form the middle tier, while those who gain weight or can no longer sustain physical demands are demoted to a cleaning class called "lemons" who wear yellow uniforms and face open ridicule. The only apparent escape is a talent competition called "Hot Shot," with entry costing 15 million merits—a sum typically requiring years of cycling to accumulate.
The protagonist, Bing, inherits this amount from his deceased brother and gives it to Abi, a quiet singer he believes might escape through her talent. Instead, judges dismiss her voice as ordinary and offer her a place on an adult entertainment channel. In response, Bing spends months pedaling to earn another 15 million merits for his own audition, where he denounces the system's emptiness while holding glass to his throat.
The judges ultimately offer him a contract to deliver rehearsed versions of his outrage as entertainment—folding his dissent back into the very system he sought to challenge.
The True Purpose of the Bikes
While the bikes in "Fifteen Million Merits" ostensibly generate energy, a more persuasive interpretation suggests they primarily generate compliance. They exhaust bodies, occupy minds, and circulate currency back into the same closed loop of consumption. Riders spend merits to skip ads or buy digital clothing for avatars that exist only on screens.
This loop reflects how much modern work functions less as intrinsic necessity and more as participation in a hyper-consumer economy, where effort sustains the system itself rather than producing anything fundamentally required for survival. The Energym concept borrows this architecture but replaces anonymous overseers with familiar tech magnates. Instead of merits, it offers purpose. Instead of a bunker, it offers the open promise of employment. The mechanism remains identical: exertion sustains the system; the system sustains the illusion of upward mobility.
The Matrix and Battery Logic
Long before Black Mirror imagined people pedaling for survival, The Matrix presented a harsher scenario. In its backstory, humans create intelligent machines, lose control, and engage in war before scorching the sky to block the sun—cutting off machines' primary energy source. The machines adapt by turning to what remains abundant: human beings.
Humans are grown and suspended in pods, their minds plugged into a simulated late-20th-century reality while their bodies generate bioelectric and thermal energy to power machine civilization. Morpheus tells Neo plainly that the Matrix exists to keep humans under control while they serve as batteries. Early drafts reportedly envisioned humans as organic processors rather than literal power cells, but the premise remains unchanged: human life becomes a resource within a self-sustaining system.
This is the rearrangement Energym hints at, with one crucial difference: this time, the arrangement would arrive wrapped in the language of choice. You walk into the gym voluntarily. You sign up willingly. You generate power intentionally. But if work elsewhere has vanished and survival still depends on earning, how voluntary is that choice? Consent begins to resemble necessity.
Sam Altman and the Human Energy Equation
If the Energym video unsettles viewers, part of the reason lies in its fictional co-founder being a recognizable figure rather than an obscure character. Sam Altman leads OpenAI, the company that released ChatGPT and accelerated what many describe as the first full-scale AI race. When someone in this position discusses energy, efficiency, and the future of intelligence, it transcends idle commentary.
Executives at the center of this transition shape capital direction, research priorities, and policy frameworks. How they frame problems often signals where the industry believes it's heading. In a recent discussion about AI's environmental footprint, Altman responded with a revealing reframing:
"One of the unfair comparisons in this case is that people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model versus how much it costs one human to do an inference query. It also takes a lot of time to train a human. It takes 20 years of your life, and all of the food you eat during that time, before you get smart. Not only that, it took a very wide spread of evolution, like a hundred billion people who have ever lived, who learned not to be eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science to produce you. The fair comparison, if you ask ChatGPT a question, is how much energy it takes to answer that question versus a human. And AI has probably caught up on an energy efficiency basis that way."
The Clinical Comparison
Altman made these remarks at the AI Impact Summit in India, responding to questions about the environmental cost of training large models. While his point was technical and accounting-oriented, the framing lingers. In this comparison, the human being becomes described as a lengthy training process: twenty years of food, schooling, and evolutionary inheritance before "inference" begins, with evolution itself treated as a pre-training phase spanning millennia.
The language isn't cruel but clinical. Food transforms into input cost, childhood into a burn-in period, and intelligence into an energy equation requiring optimization. The comparison doesn't attack humanity; it measures it. Biological and artificial intelligence are placed on the same grid and assessed according to expenditure and efficiency, as though both were systems competing for resource allocation.
Once this lens is adopted, value naturally drifts toward output rather than experience, toward optimization rather than meaning. This perspective recalls the Architect in The Matrix, who treats humanity as a variable to be managed within a larger design. The central question becomes not what a human life signifies but what it yields and how smoothly it integrates into surrounding structures.
The Narrowing Distance Between Fiction and Reality
From this vantage point, the Energym proposition no longer feels like speculative satire. If human beings are already being compared in terms of energy input and productive return, redirecting their physical exertion into the grid begins to resemble continuity rather than rupture.
What lingers most powerfully is how narrow the distance now feels between these imagined worlds and our own. The Matrix reduced the body to infrastructure. Black Mirror reduced effort to currency inside a sealed system. Energym remains, on paper, another piece of fiction.
We prefer to consider these as exaggerations, yet much of their underlying logic—optimization, engagement, productivity at any cost—is already threaded through daily life. The transition from strength as labor's byproduct to strength as aesthetic pursuit to strength as potential energy source reveals not just changing fitness trends but evolving conceptions of human purpose in an increasingly automated world.
