I am thinking about switching gyms when my current membership expires. For the past five years I’ve been going to the recreation center on the UW-La Crosse campus. I like everything about the place, except for the fact that its operating hours coincide with the university calendar. When classes are not in session, the building sometimes closes. There are at least twenty days a year when I can’t use the facility.
The YMCA in town just went through a renovation, so I checked it out as a potential place to exercise. I used to belong to the Y, but never felt entirely comfortable there. The hallways were a rabbit warren, the entire building smelled of chlorine, and a small group of old men used the men’s locker room as their private athletic club. There was a lounge just off the showers, and half-dressed septuagenarians hung out there for most of the morning. They drank coffee, read newspapers, and complained about kids running around the Y unsupervised. Occasionally a few of them would leave the lounge to spend a few minutes in the locker room’s sauna. Their presence shouldn’t have bothered me (I am a septuagenarian myself), but it did.
The most noticeable change in the Y building was a remodel of the men’s locker room. New lockers and a new shower area. The lounge and the coffee machine were gone. The sauna had been moved to the pool area. The place still smelled of chlorine, but the old men were nowhere to be seen. Apparently eliminating unnecessary amenities in locker rooms scatters old men in the same way that closing garbage dumps disperses bears.
Still I am not sure whether I will move my workouts to the Y. In retirement, the campus recreation center has become my last contact with college students, and I need a regular dose of decent young people if I am to have continued hope for the future.
If I relied on the popular press to explain Gen Zers to me, I’d come away believing they were all arrogant, self-serving jerks. The media suggests that for every Greta Thunberg or David Hogg, there are a thousand kids who dream of being influencers. A particularly disturbing article was a recent one about Harvard students who do not consider “selling out” to be a pejorative term. Rather it is used as non-judgmental shorthand to describe the inevitable loss of idealism that comes with a six-figure salary straight out of college.*
On a recent trip to the rec center, I mentioned to Cece, a student worker who oversees the front desk, that I hadn’t seen her in a while. With a big smile on her face, she explained, “I’m student teaching this semester and can only work weekends.”
“You are student teaching, and you still find time to work here?” I asked.
“I love student teaching,” she replied, “but it’s unpaid. I need this job to pay my rent.”
Cece might never earn six figures, but she’ll also never have to justify to herself why she sold out. How am I supposed to give up being around such people?
* An editorial in the Harvard Crimson rationalized selling out by claiming that a young person can do more good by working for The Man and donating 10% of a massive salary to charity than by working for a non-profit at lousy pay. This lame excuse reminded me of my years reshelving case reporters in the Harvard Law School Library. During that time, more than one law school student told me, “Rich people deserve good lawyers, too.” See https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/26/climaco-harvard-sell-out. Also https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/business/gen-z-college-students-jobs.html.
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