Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotion and their reactions) simultaneously. In a state of dissonance, people may feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment.

I’m there.

While I love many things about my Smart Phone I truly despise how dumb it makes the masses as individuals.

Do you really think you look cool walking around the gym texting madly with earbuds stuffed in tight? Is that scintillating “text”ual conversation you’re deeply embedded into actually more fascinating and productive than actually working out…at the GYM….that you’re actually IN???

You took the trouble to dress in your best color coordinated and perfectly “used” and abused tight Lycra tank and matching shorts, your Nike LunarGlide+ 4iD’s laced with neon ties that mirror the thigh striping which perfectly shows off your well formed glutes.

I see you.

I watch you, all the while religiously doing my sets on the RockIt machines.

You flit from machine to machine, alighting like some darkly adorned butterfly, pollinating that weight set with your mere seated presence, all the while your fingers flying, undoubtedly telling your person of interest at the moment that you’re “at the gym” and fostering the illusion, at least for them, that you’re a dedicated and righteous soul who is caring for your temple of a body and denying yourself the pleasure of their in-person company.

Seriously?

You never moved a bar or a pin or a weight before you glided on to your next seemingly random encounter with the world of resistance before you.

No. Seriously.

The clock is ticking and now I’m hooked.  I do a set. Another. A third.  One machine complete I move on, begrudgingly at best but secure in the knowledge that I am at least working off the calories I consumed for breakfast and thereby buying myself a pass for something more at lunch and dinner. I plod forward.  I work.  I work OUT.

An hour.

This is what I devote to my own work at hand in the machine shop that is my gym.  This, after 30 minutes of cardio on the Precor upstairs.

And you in this hour?

You bobble about in an apparent Circle of Sprint, failing to actual DO anything other than “talk” in snippets and 140 character bytes.  Anything.  Nothing.  An entire hour.

While you are fascinating reality theatre in and of itself, even I grow bored and complacent and truly dismissive of you after an hour. I want so to approach you.  I assemble opening lines.  I am genuinely curious as to what you think.  Of your time here at “work”.  Of your not-to-be-missed-or-foreshortened conversation(s). Of yourself.

But even one so bold as I am wont to be on most occasions cannot summon the words or the wisdom or the actual want to confront you, for a confrontation is what I am really looking for if I am to be brutally truthful here.  You make me want to scream.  At you. About you. I want you to see yourself for what you really are.

A poseur.

A peacock in plumage well accessorized.

But it passes, this need of mine to confront and correct the masses.

The lure of the steamroom and the hottub beckons with my sweaty reward and I decide to silently observe and record you in your natural habitat like the mutant species that you are.

And wait for you to trip and fall over that barbell you will never see until your facedown with your phone imprinted on your nose giving, I suppose, Facebook a slightly new, more modern, application.