I think you are missing out on a key second half to this story, which would make your motivational take at the end (“uh.. feel good about yourself for trying or something?”) a lot stronger:
When you go to a ski resort, or a gym, or etc, it’s not JUST that you only see the people who ski, work out, etc, while not seeing the 90% who don’t do that activity. You see people WEIGHTED by the AMOUNT OF TIME they spend doing that activity, which skews heavily towards the most intense practitioners.
For example, suppose your local gym has 21 patrons: - 7 have lapsed in their actual workout habit; they never show up to the gym even though they keep getting auto-charged the monthly fee because they’ve forgotten to cancel their membership. - 7 manage to keep up a healthy but not outstanding workout habit—they each manage to do a one-hour workout once a week - 7 are total gym bros who get in a one-hour workout every single day, stacking those gainz
On a typical day, who visits the gym? - zero of the lapsed members - on average, just one of the once-a-week members (7 * 1⁄7 = 1) - all seven of the hardcore gym rats
So, it’s not just that you never see the lapsed members (or the people who never signed up in the first place). It’s also that you get an extremely skewed view of who “goes to the gym”—visiting the gym and looking around makes it seem like the clientele is 87.5% hardcore gym rats, when the true proportion is actually just 50%. (Albeit that 87.5% of the “total time spent in the gym” is spent by gym rats.)
You even mention this in some of your anecdotes, like “most of the other riders have been out 90 days just this season”.
For me, this fact is heartening. For something like a gym or a ski resort (or the blog posts in your feed), comparing yourself to the people you see around you is actually setting a really high bar, since the people you see around you are weighted by the time they spend doing the activity (and/or by the number of posts they write). A gentler, more intermediate basis of comparison is to all the people who do “go skiing”, but don’t go every day—the huge shadow mass of people who ski a couple times a year, whose population is probably way higher than the “I have a cabin next to the resort and buy the season pass every winter” contingent, but who are in the minority every day on the mountain.
I think you are missing out on a key second half to this story, which would make your motivational take at the end (“uh.. feel good about yourself for trying or something?”) a lot stronger:
When you go to a ski resort, or a gym, or etc, it’s not JUST that you only see the people who ski, work out, etc, while not seeing the 90% who don’t do that activity. You see people WEIGHTED by the AMOUNT OF TIME they spend doing that activity, which skews heavily towards the most intense practitioners.
For example, suppose your local gym has 21 patrons:
- 7 have lapsed in their actual workout habit; they never show up to the gym even though they keep getting auto-charged the monthly fee because they’ve forgotten to cancel their membership.
- 7 manage to keep up a healthy but not outstanding workout habit—they each manage to do a one-hour workout once a week
- 7 are total gym bros who get in a one-hour workout every single day, stacking those gainz
On a typical day, who visits the gym?
- zero of the lapsed members
- on average, just one of the once-a-week members (7 * 1⁄7 = 1)
- all seven of the hardcore gym rats
So, it’s not just that you never see the lapsed members (or the people who never signed up in the first place). It’s also that you get an extremely skewed view of who “goes to the gym”—visiting the gym and looking around makes it seem like the clientele is 87.5% hardcore gym rats, when the true proportion is actually just 50%. (Albeit that 87.5% of the “total time spent in the gym” is spent by gym rats.)
You even mention this in some of your anecdotes, like “most of the other riders have been out 90 days just this season”.
For me, this fact is heartening. For something like a gym or a ski resort (or the blog posts in your feed), comparing yourself to the people you see around you is actually setting a really high bar, since the people you see around you are weighted by the time they spend doing the activity (and/or by the number of posts they write). A gentler, more intermediate basis of comparison is to all the people who do “go skiing”, but don’t go every day—the huge shadow mass of people who ski a couple times a year, whose population is probably way higher than the “I have a cabin next to the resort and buy the season pass every winter” contingent, but who are in the minority every day on the mountain.
That’s a really good point. I don’t want to do a big rewrite, but I did add a line to the conclusion because of this. Thanks!