The Ego Problem

Stereotypes- so characteristic of human nature, yet so destructive. Stereotypes create misconceptions, obstacles, and prejudice. Even though they have consistently shown up throughout history, they have such little use. While useful from an evolutionary perspective, in the reality of modern human society, they do more harm than good.

Like most things in life, fitness has its own stereotypes. The stereotypical bodybuilder is male, narcissistic, only cares about vanity, and kisses his biceps while looking at himself in the mirror. While I have seen many bodybuilders like this, this stereotype paints the wrong picture of bodybuilding's purpose- to provide an avenue for self-improvement, health, and learning life lessons. What appears to be one big effort to fuel the ego is actually a discipline that draws parallels to music, art, and life. In this blog post, I'm going to explain why 1) bodybuilding is a fulfilling activity and 2) why the egotistical bodybuilder stereotype persists.

Let's begin by examining an activity that most people would immediately agree to be a fulfilling use of time: music. Improving one's musicianship requires hard work, discipline, passion, and motivation. Playing with other musicians teaches us how to interact with others. And of course, as we all know, music makes us all so frickin' happy! My philosophy on music: it matters less about the music itself and more about what you gain from being dedicated to it. Stan Efferding (a famous bodybuilder), in reference to Ronnie Coleman (another famous bodybuilder) said,

"When I say that Ronnie makes me feel bad about myself, it has nothing to do with how good he looks, or how strong he is. It has everything to do with how disciplined and hard-working he is. How much he gives of himself to help others, and how he conducts himself."

What we can learn from Efferding's quote is this: the overall goal of bodybuilding isn't to look good or be strong; rather, it is to learn to be "disciplined and hard-working," and to help yourself and others achieve happiness and success. Music is much the same. I'll reiterate: the benefits of bodybuilding don't come directly from the surface level results. They come from the skills that people develop from achieving those surface level results. Bodybuilding, music, art, sports: all of these disciplines serve as "modes of transportation" towards the end goal of self-improvement and self-fulfillment.

Now that I've established that bodybuilding provides existential satisfaction, the question now arises, why does it hold such a negative stigma? In my opinion, we can trace the roots of the stigma to a natural human tendency: to judge things even when we know little about them. Most people don't know a lot about bodybuilding, yet what they do know is that they've seen narcissistic meatheads in movies and on TV. When they find out that those iron junkies are bodybuilders, people will use the little amount of information they've gathered to create a stereotype.

Something that I wondered for a long time is, "why does it even matter that bodybuilders are stereotyped? It's not like they're suffering." This is mostly true, but the message here is larger than bodybuilding itself. Recognizing that most activities/hobbies can be used for self-fulfillment happiness is an extremely important realization! Living life from this perspective can help people find beauty in all areas of life, not just the areas designated by society as beautiful. It can never hurt to dissect a stereotype.