A Field Report from a Reluctant Member
I rejoined the world of gym-going in May 2025 after a decade-long absence, courtesy of sciatica that decided to take up permanent residence somewhere between L4 and my patience. My last gym experience was in Connecticut back in 2015, and even that felt like the early symptoms of the societal malaise that has now fully bloomed. Joining Jæren Sportssenter in Nærbø confirmed it: the modern gym is no longer a place where people train. It’s a place where they exist. Barely.
Walk through the doors on any given day and you’ll find the same scene: people wandering around like extras from a low-budget zombie film, earbuds screwed so tightly into their skulls they might as well be surgically implanted. They avoid eye contact as if it triggers a penalty in whatever digital religion they now worship. And the phones—dear God, the phones. I can complete a full-body workout in under an hour. Meanwhile, some twenty-something is still scrolling through Insta, stroking TikTok, and playing a few rounds of Candy Crush like it’s part of a NASA simulation.
At this point, I’m half convinced that if you actually break a sweat, a silent alarm goes off somewhere and a drone is dispatched to escort you out.
The place is only partially manned—and “manned” is generous. On the rare occasions when a human employee is present, it’s a middle-aged woman welded to her office chair, hypnotized by whatever spreadsheets or cat videos occupy her workday. Out on the floor, weights are strewn around like a toddler threw a tantrum in a metallurgical factory. A small forest of laminated “Rules” decorates the walls, none of which anyone follows, enforces, or possibly even reads.
Then there are the kids. Oh yes, the kids. They’re performing exercises that would make Cirque du Soleil send a polite cease-and-desist. One-legged squats while rubbing their stomachs, patting their heads, checking their phone camera angles, and presumably editing the TikTok masterpiece they’ll post later with a caption like “grind never stops.” Spoiler: the grind absolutely stops the moment they need to put the weights back.
Whatever happened to actual training? Squats. Bench. Rows. Shoulder presses. You go in, you lift the iron, you leave. That’s it. You don’t need a performance art degree or a tripod.
And the soundtrack to all this madness? Soft Christmas carols. In July, in December, in March—it doesn’t matter. The gym apparently believes the correct mood for pushing a barbell off your chest is a gentle, soothing rendition of “Silent Night.”
What in the goddamn fuck?
Where is AC/DC? Where is Aerosmith? Hell, I would settle for anything with a guitar and a bass drum. Instead, I’m expected to deadlift while being serenaded like a shopper browsing a mall kiosk for scented candles. It’s like training in a Hallmark movie, except with worse form.
Look, I get that gyms aren’t the social hubs they once were. When I first joined Ludvig’s Treningsstudio and Harald’s Gym back in the 70s and 80s, people actually talked to one another. You learned things. You swapped training advice. You occasionally made eye contact without the other party acting like you’d attempted a felony. But now? Now it’s a room full of people who would rather be anywhere else, together alone in their own digital bubbles.
There has to be a middle ground between the sweaty, testosterone-fogged dens of the past and whatever this sterile, screen-addled morgue of modern fitness culture has become.
Because if this is the future of gyms—people floating around in noise-cancelled purgatory, doing everything except exercising—then forgive me, but the old man yelling “kids these days” has a point.
And yes, kid: get off my lawn. Or at least re-rack your weights.
And to be clear, this isn’t really a dig at Jæren Sportssenter. They’re just playing the hand the era has dealt them. The staff is fine, the facility is fine, and the membership is no better or worse than anywhere else in 2025. This is a broader indictment of what gyms everywhere have turned into: temples of distraction, where the machines get more attention than the muscles and the phones get more reps than the people. If anything, Nærbø is just the unlucky stage where I happened to notice the full absurdity of modern gym culture laid out in fluorescent lighting.