There’s this idea I keep coming back to — the search for the perfect routine. The one you can do forever. The right app, the right program, the right gym, the right gadget. It’s always just around the corner, and if you can just find it, everything clicks. This is what I think of as The Soulmate Fitness Fallacy, and it’s more seductive than people admit.
I know I do this. I get bored, find something new, buy a new gadget, get excited. And the thing is, I know what I’m doing while I’m doing it — and I still do it. It’s the same energy that there is no such thing as a soulmate captures in relationships: the fantasy that the right match will make everything effortless. It doesn’t work that way in love, and it doesn’t work that way in fitness either. This pattern shows up in Metafitness too — the obsession with optimizing the system instead of actually doing the thing.
It’s not just fitness. PKM is exactly like this. You’re always improving your notes, restructuring your folders, finding a better workflow — and nothing actually gets done. Beware of the soulmate myth makes the point that the myth isn’t harmless — it actively keeps you from doing the real work. The search becomes the substitute for the thing itself.
The inner work is just hard. That’s the whole story. There’s no misunderstanding to correct, no reframe that makes it easier — it’s just difficult, and you have to do a little at a time and let it move slowly. The destructive fantasy of finding a soulmate is destructive precisely because it offers an escape from that difficulty. If you actually believed none of this, the one thing you’d stop doing tomorrow is looking for something new — and you’d just do the thing. That’s what Where Fitness Went Wrong keeps pointing at too.