The Evolution of Strength: From Labor's Mark to Leisure's Project
For the vast majority of human history, physical strength required no branding or special designation. When individuals possessed thick wrists, a heavy gait, or a back that curved slightly forward from constant use, these features served as visible records of daily demands placed upon their bodies. Fields needed tilling, stones required moving, and timber demanded cutting and carrying. The human form naturally documented these necessities through its development.
Being muscular—what contemporary society might label as "shredded" or simply "looking hot"—was never an independent goal in earlier eras. Rather, it emerged as an incidental byproduct of essential work that needed completion. Physical development occurred organically through the execution of necessary tasks rather than through deliberate aesthetic pursuit.
The Post-Industrial Transformation of Physicality
In our current post-industrial landscape, this bodily documentation has become entirely elective. Broad shoulders now belong as frequently to office workers spending hours before screens as to laborers moving freight. The once-direct connection between physique and profession has significantly loosened; one can no longer reliably discern a person's trade through their posture alone.
The most sculpted bodies in modern urban environments are often constructed within air-conditioned rooms under fluorescent lighting, lifting stainless steel weights that serve no purpose beyond being lifted repeatedly. We run on conveyor belts that transport us nowhere physically. Protein shakes mix in matte-black bottles, heart rates and calorie counts flicker across wearable screens, macronutrients are tracked with devotional precision, and compression fabrics have become standard workout uniforms.
A thriving subculture hums around supplements, specialized powders, and optimization metrics. We speak casually about "putting in the work" even when our professional careers leave no physical marks on our bodies whatsoever. Effort itself has transformed into an aesthetic pursuit. The final product is no longer timber, stone, or steel—it is the human body itself, treated as a continuous optimization project.
The Treadmill Economy and Viral Speculation
In a world where fitness centers already operate as sophisticated commercial ecosystems—complete with monthly subscriptions, branded supplements, premium membership tiers, personal trainers, and influencer discount codes—it requires minimal imagination to envision this exertion being redirected toward more "productive" applications. If thousands of bodies already burn energy on polished studio floors each morning, why not capture and convert those calories into electricity?
The technical feasibility of such systems can be debated separately. As two optimistic maxims that have inspired numerous grand undertakings remind us: Plato declared that "necessity is the mother of invention," while George Herbert asserted that "where there's a will, there's a way." Historical evidence suggests we take such sentiments seriously when circumstances tighten significantly.
Humanity has repeatedly reorganized labor systems, redrawn national borders, constructed cities in deserts, and fashioned computer chips from ordinary sand and stone. If the concept of converting people into energy sources appears morally excessive, we should recall that throughout history, societies have accepted far harsher systems with thinner justifications. At minimum, one might imagine we would all emerge remarkably fit from such arrangements.
A Near-Future Scenario: 2030 and Beyond
Now project this concept into a near future, perhaps around 2030, where automation has absorbed approximately 80 percent of traditional jobs, leaving billions economically redundant. These individuals still require income for survival but likely need purpose even more desperately. What universal credential remains accessible to nearly everyone? Limbs that can move. Bodies capable of exertion. In a fragmented labor market, this becomes the one qualification almost all people still possess.
This idea originates not from personal speculation but from a forty-second AI-generated video currently circulating online. The presentation features hyper-realistic versions of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman appearing five years older, seated together as co-founders of a fictional venture called Energym.
Their company's proposition is straightforward: if artificial intelligence systems and robotics have displaced most forms of employment, let humans generate electricity through exercise and feed that power back into the infrastructure that replaced them. Compensate people for this activity. Frame it, as the Altman avatar describes, as a solution that "solved our need for energy and your need for purpose"—positioning it as recruitment rather than redundancy.
The pitch rests on an unspoken recognition that money alone cannot resolve the existential void created by mass unemployment, and that without work, daily life loses its fundamental structure. Even affluent but unmoored individuals—like the familiar television trope of a spouse left alone in a large house—illustrate how material provision does not automatically create meaning.
Work, for better or worse, has long functioned as proof of usefulness. Remove it, and something more destabilizing than income disappears. The Energym concept seizes upon this inversion: if millions are no longer required for traditional labor yet still seek the structure and validation that work once provided, exercise can be recoded as employment.
Black Mirror Parallels: Fifteen Million Merits
Anyone familiar with the British dystopian anthology series Black Mirror will immediately recognize this structure. The show's second episode, "Fifteen Million Merits," presents an enclosed, self-contained world where people spend their days cycling on stationary bikes to generate electricity. These bicycles power a vast, screen-saturated complex where inhabitants also reside, with no visible life existing beyond this environment.
In exchange for their pedaling, riders earn "merits"—a digital currency used to purchase food, basic necessities, and small digital luxuries that make confinement more bearable. Each person lives in a small grey room lined entirely with screens containing no conventional windows, only moving images. Advertisements interrupt constantly, and attempting to avoid them is not optional.
If a rider closes their eyes or looks away, the screen emits a piercing alarm, flashes red, and displays a command to "CONTINUE VIEWING," with the sound persisting until their gaze returns. Muting or skipping advertisements results in merit deductions. Attention is systematically enforced within this closed system.
Even personal identity becomes mediated through digital avatars called "Doppels" (short for doppelgängers), which function as individuals' stand-ins throughout this enclosed world—in games, social spaces, and talent shows like "Hot Shots" that promise potential escape. Riders spend hard-earned merits customizing these avatars with new hair, clothing, and accessories—cosmetic upgrades signaling status within a system offering little else.
The society is deliberately stratified. Those physically fit enough to pedal form the middle tier. Individuals who gain weight or can no longer sustain physical demands are demoted to a cleaning class called "lemons" who wear yellow uniforms, clear cyclists' waste, and face open ridicule. In video games played by riders, they appear as targets, with some forced into a grotesque in-house program called "Botherguts," a virtual game show built around their humiliation for entertainment. Class contempt is not incidental but structurally embedded, much like in our own society.
The only apparent escape route is the "Hot Shot" talent competition, with entry costing fifteen million merits—a sum typically requiring years of cycling to accumulate. The protagonist Bing can afford entry only because he inherited merits from his recently deceased brother. Rather than spending them on himself, he gives the entire amount to Abi, a quiet singer he has grown close to, convinced her talent might offer escape from their enclosed world.
She performs with sincerity, but judges dismiss her voice as ordinary, focusing instead on her appearance and offering a position on an adult entertainment channel rather than artistic recognition. The humiliation unfolds gradually on screens surrounding Bing's room. In response, he returns to his bicycle, spending months pedaling to earn another fifteen million merits for his own audition.
When he finally reaches the stage, he doesn't sing. Instead, he speaks while holding a glass shard to his throat, denouncing the emptiness of a system that has commodified everything, including Abi's dignity. The judges listen, deliberate, and decide his anger has commercial potential. Rather than punishing him, they offer a contract, larger living quarters, and a regular platform to deliver rehearsed versions of the same outrage—now packaged as entertainment within the very structure he sought to challenge.
The bicycles in that episode ostensibly generate energy, but the more persuasive interpretation suggests they generate compliance. They exhaust bodies, occupy minds, and circulate currency back into the same closed loop of consumption. Riders spend merits to skip advertisements or purchase digital clothing for avatars existing only on screens. This loop reflects how much modern work functions less as intrinsic necessity and more as participation in a hyper-consumer economy where effort sustains the system itself rather than producing anything fundamentally required for survival.
The Energym concept borrows this architecture but replaces anonymous overseers with familiar tech magnates. Instead of merits, it offers purpose. Instead of a bunker, it presents the open promise of employment. The mechanism remains identical: exertion sustains the system; the system sustains the illusion of upward mobility.
Contemporary Parallels in Digital Economies
If this sounds distant from our present reality, consider how frequently digital economies already trade in status symbols. In games like Fortnite, players spend real money on cosmetic "skins" that alter appearance without affecting ability. On platforms like Snapchat, users curate Bitmojis and filters to signal belonging or aspiration. We pay to skip advertisements and upgrade to premium tiers removing interruptions.
Even dissent becomes folded back into systems; Bing's fury leaves him choosing between monetizing his outrage or returning to the bicycle. In our own media ecosystems, outrage often survives only if it generates engagement. The mechanics may be less overtly coercive, but the underlying pattern remains remarkably familiar.
The Matrix and Battery Logic
Long before Black Mirror imagined people pedaling for survival, The Matrix presented a harsher scenario. In its backstory, humans create intelligent machines, lose control, and warfare ensues. In a final attempt to weaken opponents, humans scorch the sky to block sunlight, cutting off machines' primary energy source. The machines adapt by turning to what remains abundant: human beings.
Humans are grown and suspended in pods, their minds plugged into a simulated late-20th-century reality while their bodies generate bioelectric and thermal energy powering machine civilization. Morpheus tells Neo plainly that the Matrix exists to keep humans controlled while used as batteries. Early drafts reportedly envisioned humans as organic processors rather than literal power cells, but the premise remains unchanged: human life becomes a resource within a system designed to sustain itself.
This is precisely the rearrangement Energym hints at, with one crucial difference: this time the arrangement would arrive wrapped in language of choice. You walk into the gym voluntarily. You sign up willingly. You generate power intentionally. But if work elsewhere has vanished and survival still depends on earning, how voluntary is that choice truly? Consent begins to resemble necessity under such conditions.
Sam Altman's Perspective: Humans as Energy Equations
If the Energym video unsettles viewers, part of the reason involves its fictional co-founder being not an obscure character but a recognizable figure. Sam Altman leads OpenAI, the company that released ChatGPT and accelerated what many describe as the first full-scale artificial intelligence race. When someone in this position discusses energy, efficiency, and intelligence's future, it represents more than idle commentary.
Executives at this transition's center shape capital direction, research priorities, and policy frameworks. How they frame problems often signals where their industry believes it's heading. In a recent discussion about AI's environmental footprint, Altman responded with reframing rather than denial:
"One unfair comparison people make is between how much energy it takes to train an AI model versus how much it costs one human to do an inference query. It also takes considerable time to train a human—approximately twenty years of your life, plus all food consumed during that period, before you become intelligent. Not only that, it required evolution's broad spread—roughly one hundred billion people who ever lived, learning to avoid predators and develop scientific understanding—to produce you. The fair comparison, when asking ChatGPT a question, is energy required to answer that question versus a human. AI has probably caught up on an energy efficiency basis that way."
Altman made these remarks at the recently concluded AI Impact Summit in India, responding to questions about large models' environmental costs. His point was technical, almost accounting in nature, yet the framing lingers significantly. In this comparison, human beings become described as lengthy training processes—twenty years of food, schooling, and evolutionary inheritance before "inference" begins, with evolution itself treated as a pre-training phase spanning millennia.
The language isn't cruel but clinically precise. Food transforms into input cost, childhood becomes a burn-in period, and intelligence converts to an energy equation requiring optimization. The comparison doesn't attack humanity but measures it methodically. Biological and artificial intelligence are placed on the same grid, assessed according to expenditure and efficiency, as though both were systems competing for resource allocation.
Once this lens is adopted, value naturally drifts toward output rather than experience, toward optimization rather than meaning. This perspective inevitably recalls The Matrix's Architect, who treats humanity as variables requiring management within larger designs. In this mode of thinking, the central question isn't what human life signifies but what it yields and how smoothly it fits into surrounding structures.
From this vantage point, the Energym proposition no longer feels like speculative satire. If human beings are already being compared in terms of energy input and productive return, redirecting physical exertion into electrical grids begins to resemble continuity rather than rupture.
The Narrowing Distance Between Fiction and Reality
What ultimately lingers is how narrow the distance now feels between these imagined worlds and our own. The Matrix reduced the human body to infrastructure. Black Mirror reduced effort to currency inside sealed systems. Energym remains, on paper, another fictional construct. We prefer to consider these as exaggerations, yet much of their underlying logic—optimization, engagement, productivity at any cost—is already threaded through daily existence.
The transformation of strength from labor's natural byproduct to gym-cultivated aesthetic, and potentially to commodified energy production, reflects deeper societal shifts in how we value human effort and existence in increasingly automated, efficiency-driven environments.
