David J.-M. works with his hands in a way that makes you feel like you’ve forgotten how to touch the world. He is a historic building mason, a man who understands that a wall isn’t just a pile of stones, but a conversation between gravity and time.
I watched him once, perched on a scaffold in the drizzling grey of a Tuesday morning, scraping away a century of grime from a church in the North West. He was working with lime mortar. Lime is a stubborn, temperamental medium. Unlike modern cement, which hits the ground running and dries with a brittle, arrogant speed, lime takes its time.
It needs to breathe. It needs to be tended to. David told me that if you apply it and walk away, expecting it to do the work without your presence, the wall will eventually reject it. The mortar only stays because the mason keeps showing up to check the moisture, to push back against the weather, to ensure the bond is actually forming.
We have largely forgotten that things require presence to hold. We have been sold a version of life where commitment is something you can outsource to a banking app, where “doing the work” is a line item on a spreadsheet rather than a physical act of showing up in a room full of people.
01
The Recurring Ghosts
Ellen is currently staring at her banking app. It’s Sunday night, the house is quiet, and she’s doing that thing where you scroll through your transactions to find a specific receipt but end up getting snagged on the recurring ghosts. There it is: the . Twenty-eight pounds.
It’s a modest sum, really-the price of a few fancy coffees or a takeaway that makes you feel slightly ill-but it’s the weight of what it represents that makes her chest tighten. She hasn’t set foot in that building since . It’s now nearly .
She opens the gym’s cancellation page. She’s been here before. She reads the terms: thirty days’ notice, a form that needs to be “processed,” the subtle friction of a “reason for leaving” dropdown menu. She closes the tab.
Cancelling feels like a formal admission of defeat. As long as the direct debit leaves her account, she can still tell herself she is a person who “has a gym membership.”
It’s a plan. It’s a placeholder for a future version of herself that is more disciplined, less tired, and fundamentally different from the woman currently sitting on her sofa in mismatched socks.
She does the arithmetic anyway. . Over three hundred pounds. Nine actual visits. Not one single soul in that entire warehouse of chrome and fluorescent lights would have noticed if she’d moved to Mars. The turnstile doesn’t care. The rowing machines don’t care. The staff, usually staring at a tablet behind a high desk, certainly don’t care. Anonymity is the gym’s greatest product, and Ellen is their best customer.
Storage Units for Human Intent
The industry relies on this. We like to think of gyms as temples of health, but from a purely structural perspective, they are more like storage units for human intent. If you look at the math, the commercial fitness model would physically collapse if it actually worked for everyone.
In the world of commercial fitness, the reality is stark: if just 11% more members actually turned up on a Tuesday evening, the building would fail safety standards.
The capacity math only works because a massive share of the membership never shows up. The building is optimized to be easy to buy, frictionless to ignore, and completely indifferent to your attendance. It is a commitment-without-consequence.
We buy the “possibility” of fitness, but the social cost of skipping is zero. And because the cost is zero, we blame our own lack of willpower when we predictably fail to go.
The Willpower Trap
I’ve had a song stuck in my head all morning-“Save the Last Dance for Me”-and it’s making me think about why we keep falling for the treadmill trap. We’ve industrialised exercise and then wondered why it feels like a chore. We’ve stripped away the one thing that actually makes humans do difficult things: the expectation of others.
Willpower is a finite resource, a battery that drains every time you have to make a decision at work or navigate a difficult conversation. By 6:00 PM, Ellen’s willpower battery is at 4%.
Asking her to go to a cold building and stand on a moving belt while wearing headphones and avoiding eye contact with strangers is a high-energy ask. But if she knew that a specific group of people was expecting her-if she knew that her absence would leave a literal hole in a formation-the energy dynamic would flip.
Humans are wired for the group. We are not solitary hunters of the elliptical machine. We are tribal creatures who find meaning in shared rhythm and visible progress. This is why the anonymous drop-in model is so soul-crushing.
You are a number on a screen, a data point in a “churn rate” calculation. The moment anyone in that building knew your name and expected you to be there, the whole business model of the big-box gym would start to strain under the weight of its own success.
From Subscriber to Participant
This is the fundamental shift that happens when you move from “buying equipment access” to “joining a cohort.” It’s the difference between a library where you sit in silence and a workshop where you build something together.
When people look for Floridita Dance, they often think they are looking for a way to move their feet. In reality, they are looking for a way to stop being anonymous.
The Gym Model
- Direct debit convenience
- Complete anonymity
- Self-directed “willpower”
- Zero social cost for skipping
The Cohort Model
- Fixed weekly progression
- Visible shared energy
- Social accountability
- Collective “Exhale”
In a fixed weekly course, the structure is the antidote to the “Sunday night banking app” guilt. You aren’t just paying for the right to enter a building; you are entering a progression.
The people in the room on week one are the same people in the room on week six. You see the same faces, you stumble over the same footwork, and you laugh at the same mistakes. The “willpower costume” falls away because the commitment isn’t to a brand or a building-it’s to the room.
“If you don’t show up, people notice. Not in a judgmental way, but in a ‘hey, we missed your energy’ way. That is a vastly different accountability structure than a direct debit that doesn’t care if you live or die.”
The Cracks in the Cement
David J.-M., back at his church wall, told me something else about lime mortar. He said that the reason people stopped using it for a while was because it was “too demanding.” It forced the builder to stay present.
Modern cement allowed people to build faster and walk away sooner, but the buildings didn’t last as long. They cracked. They trapped moisture. They failed because they were built for speed rather than for the reality of the environment.
We’ve done the same with our social and physical health. We’ve chosen the “cement” of the anonymous gym membership because it’s fast to buy and easy to walk away from. But the cracks are showing. We feel isolated, we feel like failures, and we keep paying for things we don’t use because we’re afraid to admit that the model itself is broken.
I’m not saying everyone needs to be a dancer. But I am saying that we need to stop diagnosing ourselves as lazy when we’re actually just lonely. The activities humans actually sustain over years, rather than weeks, are the ones where someone notices the empty space when we’re gone.
Whether it’s a bowling league, a choir, or a beginner Salsa class in the heart of Manchester, the magic isn’t in the activity itself-it’s in the expectation.
Breaking the Cycle
Ellen eventually closed her banking app and didn’t cancel the membership that night. She kept it for another month, a silent £28 tax on her own hope. It wasn’t until she walked into a room where a teacher looked her in the eye and said, “See you next Tuesday, Ellen,” that the cycle finally broke.
The moment she became a person instead of a subscriber, the guilt vanished. She didn’t need more iron; she needed more people.
We are currently living through an epidemic of “passive consumption” disguised as self-improvement. We buy the Masterclass we never watch, the language app we never open, and the gym membership we never use.
We do this because the act of buying feels like a step toward the goal. It gives us a hit of dopamine without the friction of effort. But real growth is high-friction. It requires the “lime mortar” of consistency and the presence of others to help it set.
The Collective Exhale
The beauty of a structured, progressive environment is that it removes the “what should I do today?” fatigue. When you walk into a dance studio for a beginner course, the curriculum is set. You aren’t wandering around wondering which machine to use.
You are part of a sequence. You are building on what you learned last week. This visible progress is the ultimate motivator. In a gym, unless you are meticulously tracking your lifts, progress is often invisible or takes months to manifest in the mirror.
In a dance class, you can literally feel the difference between the first twenty minutes of “I have two left feet” and the final ten minutes of “Wait, I’m actually doing this.”
That transition-from confusion to confidence-is best experienced in a group. There is a specific kind of bond that forms when twenty strangers all realize at the same time that they’ve mastered a basic step. It’s a collective exhale. It’s the sound of the wall finally holding.
If you’re sitting there looking at your own “8th of the month” ghost, stop beating yourself up about your lack of willpower. You aren’t failing the gym; the gym is succeeding at its goal of keeping you as a profitable, non-attending ghost.
Maybe it’s time to find a place where anonymity isn’t a feature, but a bug. Find a place where the mason stays on the scaffold, where the mortar is tended to, and where somebody-anybody-knows your name and expects you to be there when the music starts.
It’s a lot harder to ignore a person than it is to ignore a direct debit. And in the end, that’s exactly why it works.
