Sometimes I feel like "crabs in a bucket" with being active in the US

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]My name is Zach, I'm traveling the UK for 3 months trying to find my forever home and I want to talk a little bit about sedentary American culture. Please feel free to follow along if you want to see more. Anyway, Americans compared to Europeans are definitely a lot more sedentary. This has come up a few times in just like the medical industry conversations that I've had on this page, but one of the things that's like really interesting about the juxtaposition of the two cultures is that when I was starting to get more active in the United States, a lot of my friends who were active were very encouraging, of course, and there are still a lot of adults, but as you age, the the amount of people who are active declines pretty rapidly. So, you know, I had friends when I was starting to work train 5K to wanting to train for a 10K and ultimately a half marathon, which I didn't end up doing cuz medical reasons, unfortunately, but they were like shocked that I was doing that. They weren't mad or unsupportive or anything, but they were just surprised I would even put in the effort to do that type of thing. You know, it you know, it was always kind of mind-boggling to me of like why would you be surprised? Health is really important, like fitness it seems like why wouldn't you be doing that? But, you know, most of I I realized at that time many of those people had no regular exercise regimen or or if they did, it was very few and far between. They would come up with very elaborate excuses to not be regularly active. I have been for the last 10 years a regular gym-goer, a regular runner, a regular that type of thing. I am not the most fit person.

[00:01:30]You'll look at me, well, you can't see my fit physique right now, but I'm a little flabby. Like I'm still a product of the American diet. I still like my sugary sweets, I still like my couch, but I've I've gone to the gym five times a week since forever. You can So, that's just been a part of my life. So, when I encounter people who choose not to prioritize that with their time, it's always been a little bit surprising for me, but then when I started to get really into fitness, more like training for things, I found there was like a counter balance, like people coming like hello, there's my wife feeding the horses.

[00:02:06]Pushing back on my desire to do so, which I thought was really interesting.

[00:02:10]I think that's more of like a societal thing that happens where there's almost like if I'm not doing it, you shouldn't do it either because like clearly if it was something worth doing, I would be doing it. That's like a thing that like even becoming a content creator that comes up a lot, like people like I wouldn't tell any of my friends really that I'm making a content social media platform. Like I some of them know cuz they follow me, but I haven't gone out and been like, "Check my new page out.

[00:02:37]It's exploding. It's awesome. I'm super happy proud of it." because people who don't understand the thing that you're doing can't be supportive of it and it's really a strange thing. And I don't know if that's unique to American culture, honestly. That might be something that's everywhere, but it is very much an American thing.

[00:02:54]And that's one of the things that I am hoping not to see as much over here, just