Vanishing World, Real World

On CrossFit, Daytona, hard things, and birth rates

I finished Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata last week. I started reading the book because it seemed to be suggested by way of an analogue algorithm: first a review in a hard copy of the Financial Times, then a profile of the author in The New Yorker that I happened to flip to a few weeks ago at my aunt’s house over Memorial Day weekend. The book feels so timely that it’s almost pandering: a story of a parallel-future Japan (and world) where all children are conceived via artificial insemination and sex with a spouse is so taboo it’s considered incest. Reading it as an American, you detect flashes of headlines and X debates that have grown familiar: the main character, a woman named Amane, has romantic affinities for anime characters and plastic figurines (cue: “get ready for your AI bf/gf”), marriages are platonic and emotional affairs are normalized (cue: “the institution of marriage is facing death by a thousand cuts polyamorists”), and over the course of the book, characters observe that “sex is rapidly disappearing from the world.” (cue: the same quote, but said by Ross Douthat).

I read the final pages of Vanishing World while flying to Orlando from New York with my boyfriend, where we picked up a rental car to drive to Daytona for a CrossFit competition. The drive into Daytona was a reminder that the real world is not vanishing. We stopped at Target for peanut butter, a coffee brewer, and calorically dense snacks to sustain my boyfriend during his two-day, six-event competition, and passed other happy couples in the aisles lined with SharkNinja ice-cream products. In the same strip mall, we ate at Chik-fil-A for dinner and were greeted by the friendliest teenage cashier I’ve ever met in my life, who was either oblivious or impervious to the franchise’s political controversies. In his spare moments, the cashier walked around to tables with nuclear families, offering refills of drinks and condiments, and slipped me a free cookie because it was (to his shock) my first time at the establishment. Cue: “I fucking love America.”

When we arrived at the Daytona hotel where we were staying, which was already teeming with muscled men and women with intimidatingly strong thighs, a bellboy eyed our Target bags sagging with Core Power drinks and remarked that he was behind on his protein intake for the day. And this comment was kind of a good representation of what being at a CrossFit competition in Daytona is like: men sizing each other up, eager to flaunt their triumphs, and humble about their imperfections. You could record the voice modulation of a bellboy saying “I’m behind on my protein intake,” a CrossFit athlete saying “I could’ve done one-more muscle-up but I forgot to chalk my hands” and a football player saying “they had us in the first half, not gonna lie” and have enough context to teach Chat-GPT about humility.

Before I started dating my boyfriend, I thought CrossFit was just strength training with excellent branding. I now know, after months of observation, that CrossFit is for the kind of person who likes to deadlift 200 pounds for 10 reps, then follow it with some clean-and-jerks (lift barbell from floor to shoulder, then overhead) a climb up a 15-foot rope, all chased with a handstand walk across the gym. Do 4 rounds of that in under eight minutes, and that’s a CrossFit workout. CrossFit is not for those who yield to despair. It faces a high attrition rate (and that’s on top of the deaths that have occured during some elite-level competitions). About once a month my boyfriend will say, “Do you remember [so-and-so] from the gym?” Slight nod. “Yeah well. He just quit.”

As a spectator, you expect to attend a CrossFit competition and walk away with a quip like “if the entire arena were wiped out, there would be a perceptible concurrent 1% drop in Joe Rogan’s Spotify rankings.” But the more interesting politics present at a CrossFit competition is not whatever podcast might be streaming out of a participant’s airpods (and realistically, they’re probably listening to something high-BPM, if anything at all). It’s who’s there with them: namely, a coterie of girlfriends, wives, and babies, who are all adoring and stoically unflinching at the sound of weights crashing to the ground.

So the proper way of looking at a CrossFit competition is “if the entire world were wiped out except for this arena, there would be a 99.99999% drop in the population. But the remaining .00001% would heroically repopulate the earth with the most robust, well-sculpted specimens of the human race you’ve ever seen.”

Going to Daytona (or anywhere in America that isn’t NYC, SF, or LA) reminds you of the bubble you live in. People in finance hire firms to perform channel checks on their equities: how many cars are curbed in front of Target (or how many SharkNinja products stocked at Target are leaving the shelves)? Leaving New York feels like doing a channel check on reality. In Manhattan, you get $4.99 food delivery fees. In Daytona, you get an IHOP waitress who insists on topping off your free coffee, and handing you a to-go cup to wash down your $4.99 pancakes on the drive home. After a visit to Bass Pro Shop, my boyfriend remarked how it was designed as a whole-family experience: the kids can entertain themselves watching enormous fish in the aquarium, the moms can clothing-shop for the household, the dads can bolt upstairs to handle the guns and the hunting gear. New York has nothing that comes close, not even Coney Island. Land developers could solve New York City’s housing crisis if they studied Daytona’s ability to fit a Borgesian number of cars in a walkup-sized garage.

There is of course comfort in living in a bubble. But being in Daytona left me with an unfamiliar feeling: relief at having left mine. It’s difficult to be anxious about birth rates when the table next to you is full of toddlers messily eating hot dogs and french fries from the kids menu. It’s hard to take headlines about the decline of masculinity seriously when you’re watching men compete in CrossFit events with advance-the-gene-pool-forward names like “Helix” which involve performing Olympic snatches with barbells of increasingly heavy weight. When those same men embrace their wives and 1-3 babies after completing their competition, you’re not thinking about the disappearance of the nuclear family.

My boyfriend says that part of why he loves CrossFit is because of the ardent commitment of its participants. This commitment permeates everything: their willingness to wake up at 5am and burn 2,000 calories before dawn, the discipline to push through exhaustion, and the compulsion to do it all over the next day. You can squint and see how a family fits neatly into this schedule: the 5am wake-ups can accommodate a crying toddler, the discipline can structure a household, the compulsion creates enough momentum to sustain you into meeting your grandchildren.

This level of commitment is a choice. And it’s hard. I’ve gone to the gym many times with my boyfriend, and have even done some “CrossFit-style” workouts in lieu of my usual comfortable jogs. There is a line you cross from lifting something heavy, to lifting an amount of weight that is so fear-inducing that you feel like you’re watching yourself get dismembered in a horror movie. On days like that, your body isn’t even particularly sore, but there is a mental agony that persists hours later as you stare at the wall with half-chewed Chipotle in your mouth while you wonder “what the hell did I just put myself through?” There is no post-workout glow, and the Chipotle doesn’t taste any better than usual. The reward is much more subtle. Doing hard things is a reminder you’re capable of doing hard things. That knowledge is a sentence to doing more hard things in the future.

Last year, when I was 28, I went through a breakup. It was one of those we’re-living-together breakups, which meant that suddenly we weren’t anymore. Which meant that I needed to move all my belongings out of the apartment, and say goodbye to a former life and some version of a future I had been quietly imagining for myself. There was packing, and some tearful calls to friends and family. There was also, I’m not proud to say, a sudden obsession with Pew studies on the average age of first-time mothers (27) and US Census figures on the average age of marriage (somewhat older at 28), which I remember checking and refreshing on my laptop while I packed, as if the numbers would recalibrate more favorably whenever I filled another suitcase. For the first time in my life I felt behind, and that terrified me.

But I could find some forms of consolation in the numbers. First of all, I’m a New Yorker, where the average age of marriage skews older by roughly three years (31.4). I’d have been considerably more despondent as a Utah resident (average age 26, thank you Joseph Smith) or if I happened to be repatriating to Colombia (average age 18). So I could use Pew and the other studies I had begun to accumulate as a source of placation or defense: the statistics proved I was still within the distribution curve.

Or perhaps the statistics were telling me I was simply part of a growing plurality. After all, the numbers also say that a record-high share of 40 year olds in the United States have never been married (25%). And data tells us that people are having less sex, fewer children, women are fighting for an increasingly dwindling number of marriage-worthy men on dating apps, and things might be especially dire if you happen to be an ambitious woman.

In retrospect, I think the one of the most dangerous aspects of these kinds of stories and statistics is the fact that they are reported at all. This is not an argument that we should bury the data and tell ourselves halcyon fictions. But I do think that these stories turn themselves into self-perpetuating truths by giving people an excuse: if you’re told that staying single and childless is normal (albeit, still mostly undesirable and frowned-upon) you’re probably more likely to resign yourself to it. There was a period last year, before I met my current boyfriend, where I consoled myself with stories about the involuntarily single women whose ranks I was convinced I would be among forever. Ironically, the easier thing to do is resign yourself to the idea that sociological trends have doomed us to being alone forever. The harder thing to do is stay on the dating apps or join the run club or freeze the eggs or just be patient.

I am convinced that people are making themselves miserable at the margin by allowing themselves to be susceptible to these stories. Did fertility rates in the US and China start declining in 2008 solely because of the release of the iPhone and it’s concomitant endless stream of notifications and solo-enabling entertainment, or because of what people are seeing on their phones – namely a constant stream of articles, Twitter posts, YouTube vlogs and TikToks about how hard dating is, how crushing parenting is, how lonely life is? Maybe it’s a mix of both, but the latter feels underexplored.

We all have a choice about which world we want to live in. I was deeply disconcerted by the ending of Vanishing World, the sexless-future book I finished on the plane to Daytona, just as much as I’m disturbed by the complacency that people now talk about the world of dating and families. The world I saw in Daytona felt considerably happier, but admittedly looked harder: the participants in the CrossFit competition were sweaty and exhausted, the moms looked tired, and I noticed an absence of baby-changing stations in the women’s room. But amid all that hardness, there was also palpable love and optimism. That’s the world I want to live in.

For the flight back to New York from Daytona, I picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal and flipped through the Business section. I felt myself slipping back into another version of the real world. On the front page, there was a feature on how Dine Brands, the parent company of Applebees and IHOP, plans to integrate AI into their operations through personalized ordering and in-restaurant camera surveillance for cleanliness. The Delta seatback flaunted a new capability that enables you to log into their inflight entertainment system, and select your favorites among their movie and TV offerings, which can persist through every flight you take in the future. My boyfriend fielded work calls for his job in private equity. Our familiar tech and finance bubble was beginning to re-envelope us.

And of course there were kids and parents behind us, fresh from their pilgrimage to Disney World, and returning with us all to the real one.

Thank you to Sam for inspiring this essay.