Does Bragging About Exercise Help Hold You Accountable?

Seeing the positive in boastful selfies.

Generally speaking bragging, overconfidence and behavior of the ilk resides at the atomic level of a lot of avoidable societal ills — ills we consign ourselves to dealing with because they seem natural to the human ego and therefore, inevitable. Meanwhile, humility — the key to so many potential advances in humanity as a civil interconnected community — often remains dismissed and ignored unless of course, someone is bragging about how #humble they are. In a lot of ways, this is what critics of selfie culture see when they criticize everyone’s favorite smartphone sport. To them, it’s just another wind of movement in the sad progression of vanity’s march towards making itself inextricable to what makes humans human.

They aren’t wrong per se, but they also aren’t telling or seeing the whole story either.

This piece, I should admit, began as a guide to biking to work. Two thousand words in and seemingly finished, however, I kept being horrified at how LIVESTRONG.com most of it felt (despite going for more of, I guess, an Adequate Man style), except for the last point in my guide which was labeled “Brag About It.” In other words, I was suggesting that if you want to keep yourself motivated to bike to work, you should brag about it, even if you’re not the type of person to brag about stuff, because:

• Bragging about it makes you look obnoxious.
• Looking obnoxious draws attention.
• Drawing attention creates expectations.
• Creating expectations motivates you to continue meeting or surpassing these expectations.

It is nearly impossible to exist as an active living human being and not do something that could be spun or contrived as douchey. Calling someone a douche bag is no more specific these days than calling someone a hipster — catch-all pejoratives aimed at someone doing something you don’t do.

Being aware of this though makes bragging, at least for me, no less cringeworthy. Lapsing into a brag about biking to work is immediately followed by a knife-like contortion in my throat and in my stomach, shame as a twist-ending: It was me all along, I was the douche bag.

I get why I do it. It feels good to bike thirty-four miles per day for your commute (THERE HE GOES AGAIN) and it feels even better to know you’re doing that instead of spending time in traffic, spending money on gas and making the planet a tiny more polluted, but it feels the best to feel in that nanosecond before you deliver the brag that someone will actually be impressed by something you actually do. They won’t be, but what I’m saying is that doesn’t need to be the point.

Because once I get over these admittedly histrionic feelings, what emerges is a resolve to not be something that’s way worse than a douche bag: a fraud. My guess is this is something that anyone who has taken a gym selfie or a diet selfie or perhaps just a general selfie knows and understands even if their initial intention is simply to market themselves in their quest to get laid or loved. You post it because it makes you look good, sure, but you post it because it puts pressure on you to continue doing whatever it is that’s making you look good. People now expect this from you and despite some of the horrifying side effects this kind of pressure can have if you go too extreme and too far down that rabbit hole, for the most part this seems like a cautiously good thing.

So where does this leave us? Perhaps where contemplations of most issues leave us, with the always-useful action item to consider both sides. Find the motivational part of the selfie or the brag but leave behind the egotistical part. Cleave off the part that is more personal brand building and embrace what remains: the icky but ultimately innocuous means to a more fruitful end. I don’t know. Sometimes selfies are just fun and fun is fine. At least for biking to work, I can say the ill will engendered by the bragging and the selfies is worth it. Biking to work is one of those increasingly rare things that is seemingly all good with no sordid secret past or unforeseen butterfly effect or contrarian consideration looming in the horizon. I want to keep biking and I want the motivation to keep biking. I just hope I don’t, you know, seem like too much of douche bag in doing so.