The site is asking me for One Thing I Believe Everyone Should Know, and I have a few answers. First, that each of us is loved beyond reason or limit, and has value far exceeding what we would ever guess. And the second is to take the weight plates off of the bars at the gym, and wipe their equipment down.

We talk a lot about the first one, but not too much about the second. A few weeks ago, a woman asked me if the squat rack next to me was in use (because the bar was still loaded with weights), and I told her I didn’t think so, but I would ask the guy that was there and was now on a different machine. I asked him if he was finished with it, and he said yes, so I offered to help him unload it, to which he was incredulous. “What?” I said it was common practice to strip the weights. He looked confused and pretty aggressively answered that he didn’t know that, nobody told him. But does anyone really have to be told that?

Apparently, based on the frequency that weights are left on the bars, YES. So, I’d like everyone to know that. But a better question is, why don’t they? Why are some people so rude? But maybe they don’t know it’s so rude, and in that case, how could they possibly not know? When/Where did the philosophy of “Somebody Else” come into such popular fashion. “Why should I do it? Somebody Else will.” “Oh, don’t bother, Somebody Else will take care of it.” Ugh.

I actually have an answer to this Why, and at the risk of sounding like The Oldest Man In The World, I think the answer is, obviously, our phones. We used to pay attention, to have an awareness of our surroundings, to walk around in a fairly awake state of consciousness. This is not a romanticism of the past, when I was young… I’m not a man who thinks the past was the good ‘ol days, and everything was better. Much of our culture, most of our lives, are probably better now in so many ways. We have evolved.

But there are some things that have been lost. One of them is personal contact. We mistake screens for people, “Friends” for friends, DMs for conversation. A Zoom meeting simply isn’t a straight 1:1 substitute for a conference table. We go to the gym and, between sets, put our noses into our phones, texting, scrolling YouTube videos or Instagram reels, instead of watching those around us, seeing and learning the norms of living in a society. It’s much harder to relate in person than on a Snapchat message, and requires so many more skills and attention. We have to recognize non-verbal cues as well as tones and inflections. But we also can connect in far more depth. We will see their faces, their struggles, accomplishments, exercises, forms, etc. And we will notice easily that grown-ups (of any age) unload their weights.

We are tied to an entire world, but we are increasingly disconnected to our neighbors and separated from those we see every day. This happens to be absolutely anti-human, and it’s why we end up finding it so easy to be so mean online, categorizing each other as monsters, “us vs them” instead of how it actually is, just a great big pile of Us.

Of course, we all want everyone to strip their weights, but mostly we want to see each other in real life again, right?