I think a lot of what’s wrong with this country gets fixed at the gym. Not in Congress. At the gym.
I know how that sounds. Give me a few minutes, and then you can decide if I’m wrong.
Nobody Is Coming
Every couple of years, Washington announces the bill that’s going to fix things. Then a few hundred people spend eighteen months arguing about it, attach something unrelated to page 900, and pass it at 2 a.m. Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, it’s not showing up at your house this week.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. No bill has ever made a guy less irritable with his kids at 6 p.m. No hearing has ever gotten someone through a 2 p.m. meeting without wanting to put their head on the table. A lot of what makes daily life in this country worse — the snapping, the fog, the “I can’t deal with this today” — isn’t a Washington problem. It lives inside people who are exhausted, sleeping badly, and running on whatever was in the break room.
And Washington can’t do your pushups for you. It has a hard enough time passing a budget on schedule. I wouldn’t hand it your cardio, too.
Meanwhile, only about 47% of American adults hit the federal minimum for aerobic activity in 2024. That’s the minimum. Not marathon training. Roughly a brisk walk most days. And a record 77 million of us held gym memberships that same year, while the average visit count fell to about one and a half a week. So we’re paying for it. We’re just not going.
I’ll Go First
I don’t get to write this from a mountaintop.
I drifted. Not in a way you’d have noticed — I still dressed well and still cared how I showed up. But the machine underneath had gone unattended. My nutrition slid into whatever was convenient. My fitness turned into “I’ll get back to it eventually.” And I was writing about high standards while letting my own body fall into disrepair. That’s a tough position for the guy writing the rules.
My son Noah noticed. He didn’t lecture me, and he didn’t throw my own words back at me, which he would have been entitled to do. He wrote me a real nutrition plan — built for me, not pulled off the internet — and then built me a workout schedule.
The first thing that changed wasn’t my body. It was my energy. My head got clearer. I looked at my own day differently. The physical change came later.
That order is the whole argument.
What Actually Changes
When you’re in decent shape, you’re a different person to deal with. Not necessarily a better human being. Just a less depleted one.
You get more done, because you’re not dragging yourself through the afternoon. Your fuse gets longer — the thing that would’ve set you off at dinner is just a thing that happened. You carry less stress around. And you start making better decisions.
The mental health piece has the most behind it. A big 2023 review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine — pulling together more than a thousand trials — found exercise has a real effect on depression, anxiety, and distress. For mild to moderate cases, that’s in the neighborhood of what first-line treatment does. It’s not a cure, it doesn’t replace treatment, and the effect gets smaller in the tightest studies, partly because you can’t fool someone into not knowing they worked out.
The rest — the patience, the productivity, the better decisions — I’ll be upfront: some of that isn’t cleanly proven. A lot of it is people reporting how they feel. I believe it anyway, partly because the energy and clarity were the first things I noticed myself. You can weigh that however you want.
Now Multiply It
You’re not one person. You’re one person times everyone you deal with in a day. Your spouse. Your kids. The coworker who needs an answer. The guy behind the counter who got your order wrong.
There’s research suggesting this stuff spreads. The Framingham Heart Study data found that when a friend became obese, your own odds went up 57%, and happiness seemed to travel through people’s connections too. Critics argue that similar people just tend to find each other in the first place, and they have a point. So call it suggestive, not settled. But it lines up with what most of us have seen in our own families and offices.
Now run that across a hundred million people. A hundred million people who are a little less tired, a little less irritable, a little more able to handle a bad afternoon without taking it out on someone.
There’s money in it too. Physical inactivity is tied to roughly $192 billion a year in U.S. healthcare spending. That’s not a rounding error, and it’s not a number anyone in Washington is close to solving.
What This Doesn’t Fix
Plenty.
It doesn’t fix wages. It doesn’t fix a night shift that makes normal sleep impossible, or a neighborhood with nowhere safe to walk, or a gym membership when the monthly math already doesn’t work. And for severe depression, bipolar disorder, or anything acute, exercise helps alongside treatment. It doesn’t replace it.
There’s also a fair criticism of everything I just wrote: if you frame big structural problems as personal fitness failures, you let policy off the hook. That’s a real point. I’m not arguing policy doesn’t matter.
I’m arguing it’s slow, and you’re living in the meantime. Nobody is redesigning the food system or your schedule for you. That’s not cynicism. That’s the forecast. Which leaves one variable you actually control.
I’m not waiting on Washington for this one. I’d suggest you don’t either.
Your move.
From Brave & Boundless, Chapter 5 — “Own Your Presence”:
Decades later, I’d drifted. Not in the obvious ways — I still dressed very well, still cared about presentation. But the machine underneath? I’d let it slide. My nutrition had slipped into convenience. My fitness had deteriorated into “I’ll get back to it eventually.” I was preaching high standards in my work while letting my own body — the vehicle that carries me through everything — fall into disrepair.
I wasn’t practicing what I was writing about. And my son Noah noticed.
He didn’t lecture me. Didn’t guilt me. Didn’t throw my own words back in my face, though he would’ve had every right to. Instead, he went to work.
Noah wrote me an entire nutritional plan. Not some generic template pulled from online — a real plan, customized for me, based on research and his own experience transforming his body. Then he built me a complete workout schedule. Structured. Progressive. Designed to meet me where I was and push me toward where I needed to be.