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Feeling “stuck” is the best way to get yourself into an emotional black hole of frustration and resentment.

And, the reality is that you will spend most of your time working on anything difficult in a state of “stuck-ness.” So, while it’s never comfortable, it’s definitely a state that you’d better learn to appreciate.

I had a mini-meltdown the other day where I felt powerless and unable to make progress on anything that I’m working on.

Sure, I do a lot of different things (probably too many), and there is often inherent pleasure in working on the various projects that I take on. But, it’s foolish to pretend that there isn’t always a desire for money, freedom and status associated with any pursuit.

SLSC has been at a variety of membership plateaus for the last three years – all of which are at least 20 members short of the numbers that we need to aggressively pay off our debt in a timely matter. We’ve improved the quality of our product and our operations at just about every stage of the business dramatically – but the biggest variables for settling at a higher membership number are the population density of our neighborhood, the churn rate based upon people moving or changing jobs, and the number of people who prefer to train during non-peak hours (since we are basically full at 6am and 5:30pm). We don’t have a lot of control over any of those variables.

Legion has a solid group of individualized coaching clients, but we are roughly at capacity in terms of taking on more of those clients. We have been working on building an audience and coming up with ways to add additional pillars to our business other than individualized coaching, and we’ve had some success with writing longer guides on movement issues and engine-building for CrossFit athletes. However, the variable that most controls success in coaching is working with successful and marketable athletes. This involves either being lucky (by having one of those athletes walk into your gym) or being famous (so top athletes looking for coaching actively seek you out since you’re already part of that “circle.”)

My podcast has something of an audience. Most episodes get several hundred listens, and ones that “do well” or have a famous guest on will get a few thousand listens. However, I don’t have enough of an audience to have any leverage with getting guests. There’s a threshold that – once passed – results in a show having enough of an audience and enough social proof that it enters a positive feedback loop where people recommend the show, guests see other guests that they admire on the show, and it creates a virtuous cycle. So, I feel stuck in a weird, in-between space where the show has had some success, but is not successful enough to give me leverage to really do anything with it.

My bands have put out several records that have done reasonably well within specific underground death metal scenes. However, the biggest variables associated with “success” in music are getting a “co-sign” from established artists with a similar audience, or tapping into an “identity” such that music fans can say something about themselves by identifying as a fan of a specific artist. Since everyone in my bands has real careers or other bands that are their primary focus, we will never be full-time touring musicians which puts an inherent ceiling on how much we can put behind our records. We also struggle to make our music “cool.”

I play soccer two times per week in rec leagues, and, at 34, I’m probably the oldest player on my teams. I sprained my knee at the end of the indoor season about 2-3 months ago. Since then, I’ve felt slow and awkward on the ball, and I’ve struggled to play the way that I used to. Is this indicative of aging taking its toll, or is this an after-effect of an injury that – while no longer painful – is still impacting my performance on a subconscious level by altering my movement patterns?

While none of these thoughts are particularly helpful, it doesn’t change the chatter that runs through my head.

Since some point last October, I’ve been on a mission to connect all of the different pieces of software that we use at SLSC so that we have “one source of truth” for our client numbers.

I’ve made it a point to attempt to read and listen to more opinions from ends of the political spectrum that I tend to disagree with.

As someone who grew up in punk and hardcore and has historically been quite left-leaning, I get pretty excited when I can find a conservative voice that allows me to see what I would consider to be a reasonable “other side” to a lot of political arguments.

For this reason, I regularly read Ross Douthat’s work in the New York Times.

In a recent column – called “The Faults Beyond our Algorithms” – Douthat makes the argument that the radicalization of young men by YouTube recommendations is not just due to the effectiveness of these algorithms at generating clicks and view time.

In order for the recommendations for conspiratorial and alienated viewpoints to resonate with an audience, there must be a need that these more extreme view points fulfill.

Douthat argues that the removal of traditional values and social structures is key to the creation of this of a “disaffected conspiracy theorist” shaped gap in American society.

Given my recent reading and enjoyment of Bowling Alone – a detailed dive into the decline of social capital in American society – I’m pretty convinced by Douthat’s reasoning.

As we remove more and more of the pieces of our culture that give people a sense of belonging, we likely create opportunities for more and more people to search for meaning in all the wrong places (like YouTube rabbit holes of conspiracy thinking).

It’s difficult to tease out how many of the potentially radicalized folks would have participated in “more wholesome” institutions than YouTube recommendation k-holes, but it’s not hard to imagine that – on the margins – there are potentially quite a few people who would have found a sense of belonging in their local community that would have precluded them from being so vulnerable to “suggested videos.”

A more traditional leftist argument would likely focus on economic inequalities and the crippling debt that many folks are burdened with as they graduate from college as primary causal factors for the tendency of people to seek to “blow up a rigged system” and gravitate toward all kinds of sketchy red pill ideologies.

This inequality certainly plays a role in creating frustration, anger and alienation on which demagogues can capitalize, but I have historically underrated the role of tradition in filling the social gap that is now occupied by conspiracy videos and trolling in Reddit comments.

One of my favorite people to listen to is Marc Andreessen.

You can thank Marc for the creation of the web browser, and you can also blame him for the spread of social media via his venture capital firm’s investment in Facebook.

In a recent interview with Brian Koppelman, Marc applies his understanding of complex systems and markets honed through years of venture capital investing to more creative fields like music and film.

On the surface, one might think that “business and investment” is different from “music and art,” but there’s a shocking amount in common between trying to be the next billion dollar start-up and trying to be a rock star.

There’s quite a few similarities between the success of a fintech app disrupting a bloated incumbent in the financial industry and an up-and-coming Soundcloud rapper.

Both require an insight into a coming wave of cultural change, a product that resonates deeply with a target market, and a healthy dose of luck and timing.

In art, music, and technology, technical operators often experience frustration that the “best product doesn’t win.” Musicians almost universally prefer Megadeth to Metallica based upon technical chops, songwriting, and innovation, but Metallica is a much more popular band (much to Dave Mustaine’s chagrin).

The start-up world is littered with failed technologies that were just before their time or were superior technologically to the eventual “winner” in a market, but that never quite resonated with consumers.

Instead, what matters is creating “flywheel” effects where the interest generated in your product or your art is leveraged to further meet consumer demand – especially since, once you have the flywheel spinning, you are able to continually lean on the continued consumer interest and feedback from your market to iterate and outpace competitors who are looking to also own some market share.

In the case of a start-up, this means that you are trying to solve an unsolved problem in a way that resonates with a market who experiences some sort of pain point or latent desire in such a way that – through the introduction of your product – you kick off a feedback loop where users start aggressively using your product and demanding more features to further help them solve their problems.

If you strike the balance correctly of listening to feedback while understanding that users often don’t know exactly what they want, you can continue to innovate in a way that resonates with a market that already knows and trusts you through the use of your service.

In music, it’s a bit more difficult to think about “solving a problem” for a target market.

Instead, musicians need to resonate with an identity such that their fans can say something about themselves by displaying their fandom of a specific artist. Most people don’t latch onto a band because they like the music (although that does matter). They latch onto a band because they like what being a fan of that band says about them.

As Seth Godin has said, “The Beatles didn’t invent teenagers.”

It’s more important to tap into either a latent cultural identity (typically frustrated by the existing paradigm in music – ie thrash metal and death metal reacting against the theatrics of posturing of hair metal in the 80s or bebop opening up entire new paradigms of jazz improvisation and breaking out of the stuffy big band structure) or to fully embrace an orthodoxy and appeal to connoisseurs and otaku (those with obsessive interests in a specific subdomain) in niche subgenres like grindcore, acid house, or d-beat.

In both business and art, those who win big are often solving their own problems or expressing their own identity – they just happen to tap into larger cultural forces that are coalescing around them at the same time.

And, through their success and exposure they are simultaneously both better to understand their audience and their market – as well as shape the conversation through their own output as they become culturally influential with the groups that have built their identity around either a specific genre or technology.

In my continuing quest to better understand the desire for social connection that afflicts most people (this is a partial joke about my own disagreeable nature), I recently read a book called Bowling Alone based upon multiple recommendations from disparate sources.

In this book, Robert Putnam makes a pretty compelling case that American social capital has been steadily declining for decades. The two main culprits, he argues, seem to be longer commutes and television. (Keep in mind that this book was written before the explosion of social media).

As someone who has repeatedly written with concern about the effects that social media has had on the way that we relate to both other human beings and the ideas that other human beings have, I found it very interesting to read something written just a few years before Facebook was created and long before algorithmic curation and newsfeeds became the norm for social networks and content aggregators.

With any complicated phenomenon, it’s extremely challenging to create causal explanations through epidemiological data and survey responses, but Putnam is fairly careful in terms of how he explains things – offering many caveats and alternative explanations for his conclusions, as well as some more detailed explanations of his statistical processes in the appendix.

While each innovation in media seems to bring out Luddites railing against the potential unintended consequences – from the printing press, to radio, to television, to e-mail, to social media – that doesn’t mean that each of those groups haven’t had valid critiques. We often find, though, that the juice is in fact worth the squeeze when introducing new technologies. The introduction of the printing press probably did impact the overall ability of the population to memorize important cultural stories and it probably did introduce a sense of information overwhelm that resulted in people going “wide” on a lot of topics rather than “deep” on a few culturally agreed upon classics. But, we’d rather have a lot of different ideas from different authors than sitting around reciting the Iliad yet again – and that’s a fine trade-off to make.

If I overlay Putnam’s arguments with my experiences both as a relatively anti-social person and as a person with a leadership position in a small-ish organization in which I’m trying to create higher degrees of social capital, I can say that I’ve seen and felt an overall decline in engagement and willingness to “participate.”

In Putnam’s arguments, he blames commuting – both due to the time spent traveling as well as the fracturing of the community that one engages with, since an individual can now belong to three geographical communities for home, work, and hobbies/children’s activities as opposed to all of those taking place in the same region – as well as television – due to the very low transaction cost ability to stay home instead of engaging in the broader community – as the two major causal factors for the decline in social capital.

If I think about the difficulties of trying to either get myself to attend a social event or to get others to attend something like a gym outing or a heavy metal concert, I think that the low transaction cost of staying home coupled with the high mental transaction cost of going out (despite some improvements in transportation efficiency due to ride-sharing, etc.) may be a key factor in terms of the continued decline in engagement.

Note that this is all wild speculation and I have no business talking about any of this stuff with any authority since I’ve basically read one book on it lol.

Increased at-home entertainment options – from things like Netflix, smartphones, and social media – make it really easy to elect to stay home. And, in fact, staying home is often a much more engaging experience – even if it may not provide us with the same level of retroactive fulfillment as heading out into the world.

Imagine going to an amusement park.

Most of the time, you’re hot, waiting in a line, surrounded by obnoxious people, feeling crowded, and overpaying for snacks. But, the brief thrills that you get from the rides (the “peak experiences” of the trip) are exciting enough and salient enough in your memory that it’s worthwhile for many people to make the trip.

However, your moment-to-moment experience would be much more positive staying at home and watching Netflix rather than waiting in line for 30 minutes to spend $15 on a terrible piece of pizza at Great America. Sometimes, we seemingly prioritize the satisfaction of our future self’s memories over the immediate comfort of our current selves.

The options and connectivity presented to us by the internet also create a sense of overwhelm with the various obligations, FOMO and event invites that we all receive. We also receive fewer individual invitations to participate in social activities, since a lot of outreach occurs through Facebook event invites, group texts, and e-mail blasts.

Additionally, we are also concerned with curating our digital image on social media, and we know that almost everything we do will be documented in some form or another through Instagram stories and group pics. This creates a pressure for everything to be “extra fun” – which can also make things overwhelming since we may not feel up to dressing up and putting on a show for the cell phone.

This all combines to create a high mental transaction cost for engaging in social commitments, since we have to make dozens of decisions to filter through all of our options and prepare ourselves to be documented – even though the physical transaction cost getting somewhere has likely been reduced through the omnipresence of ride-sharing.

On an individual level, then, it’s easy to see how the access to easy, low friction entertainment that promises a steady level of comfort in Netflix and social media can overwhelm the high activation energy needed to attend a social gathering, a concert, or an optional community meeting.

Putnam discusses TV watching and categorizes individuals into those who either passively turn on the television whenever they are home versus those who only watch TV when they have actively chosen to follow a specific show. It seems that the negative effects on social engagement of television are more pronounced in the first group of passive television consumers.

The causality of something like this is likely complicated – and I would hypothesize that behavior here potentially tracks with a personality trait like conscientiousness – meaning, those who tend to be organized, structured, and better at controlling impulses are much less negatively affected by the presence of a low-friction entertainment option like television. (See also: junk food)

Still, I think that we are likely to see a bifurcation of negative effects on engagement that is further exacerbated by things like smart phones, social media, and Netflix.

Those who are better able to organize their time and control their attention are likely to disproportionately reap the benefits of easy access to information and culture facilitated by the internet – and others are more likely to end up disengaged from their communities, engaging in flame wars on Facebook, and deciding not to vaccinate their children because of YouTube.

To be clear, I also don’t think it’s totally fair to “blame” social media per say for this bifurcation or this continued trend of decreasing social capital.

This was very clearly a trend that has been in place for decades.

That, however, doesn’t mean that new innovations aren’t integral to the continuation of that trendline.

Think of something like Moore’s Law: “the number of transistors on a circuit doubles every two years.” In order for the trend to continue, researchers and companies need to keep on innovating and keep on packing in those transistors. This isn’t some natural phenomenon that plods along indefinitely – and the rate of doubling has in fact slowed in recent years.

Similarly, the decline in social capital likely requires continued innovation that further facilitates people staying home feeling overwhelmed – and further disconnected from their communities.

As a high school leftist, I would have looked down upon my current self with contempt based upon the fact that I give significant mental energy to the dynamics of markets and how they improve the quality of life for both business owners and consumers.

The market for CrossFit gyms has been consolidating over the last few years in the United States – meaning that many original gyms are closing or being purchased by other groups, and many of the gyms that started after the wave of initial success circa 2012 are limping along and occasionally shuttering their doors.

What’s going on here?

Some gyms are collapsing under the weight of the debt that they took on to finance their growth, others are noticing members churning out faster than they can replace them – resulting in a settling point of monthly cash flow that is below what makes it worthwhile to continue operating, some have pivoted business models to focus on Facebook marketing and 6 week challenges as opposed to “forging elite fitness,” and others have owners who have badly burned out from years of stress and chaotic hours with minimal financial reward.

While this happens, some of the gyms that “do things well” are getting stronger based upon flywheel effects where they are able to leverage their membership and cash flow to reinvest in their business and their staff – thus making the gap between them and the rest of the market even greater.

So, gyms that are coming on the market now are competing with even more established businesses with a significant head start – which makes the start-up costs to get involved in the market much higher since the expectation of the consumer has been elevated significantly.

Since boutique fitness in a brick and mortar location is a pretty low margin business, taking on significant debt to finance the growth of a new location is a pretty risky proposition (I should know since we did this at SLSC).

However, the introduction of these well-financed competition creates some interesting dynamics, since these businesses compete away marginal clients from pre-existing gyms – often while operating with business models that are not sustainable over the long term.

This is not something like the battle between Uber and Lyft where venture capitalists placed huge bets on the eventual profitability of each fraction of a percentage point of marketshare in a future with autonomous vehicles and layers of businesses built atop the logistical infrastructure developed to facilitate ride-sharing.

Instead, many of these folks are amateur investors who enjoy fitness and think it would be fun, cool and fulfilling to own a gym. (No knock on these folks, since I totally get it – we took money from some of them, as well).

I do have concern for the future of the boutique fitness industry, though, since so many gyms are operating with unsustainable business models.

What happens to the “big players” in the market that eventually close down since they’re unable to generate enough of a margin due to constant competition from competitors who aren’t subject to normal market dynamics based upon significant investments of amateur capital?

What happens to the new gyms that take on huge debt to get going but will never generate enough of a margin to pay it back?

How does this serve the clients who want to be coached by professionals – but the structure of the fitness industry doesn’t allow for enough revenue to support paying a living wage to coaches?

How do owners of boutique fitness businesses set up their businesses to be stable over time when they have to coach classes and work with clients for 30+ hours per week to generate enough revenue to pay themselves and keep the lights on?

I wish this problem statement was leading to some sort of clever and insightful solution, but all I can do for now is frame the problem.