Until recently, I had way too much time on my hands.
This gives a person time to notice things. Important things. Like the fact that apparently everybody is wearing weighted vests now.
I started seeing them everywhere. People walking through the neighborhood wearing what appears to be body armor, except nobody is protecting the perimeter.
They’re walking a golden retriever.
And before anyone wearing a weighted vest gets angry with me, I am not making fun of weighted vests.
I am making fun of us. Mostly me.
Because after seeing approximately four people wearing them, I immediately thought…
Should I have a weighted vest? That is fascinating…
I had lived fifty-five perfectly acceptable years without once thinking, You know what this walk needs? Seventeen additional pounds strapped to my torso.
Four neighbors later, I’m apparently researching one. This is what we do.
We see enough people doing something and suddenly it stops looking strange and starts looking necessary.
We have always been like this.
Susan Powter screamed STOP THE INSANITY at us while somehow creating an entirely new kind of insanity.
We bought ThighMasters.
Shake Weights.
Fidget spinners.
We stacked cups competitively.
For a while, we thought Segways were going to replace walking.
In the 1980s, I owned a sauna suit.
I would put it on and exercise while sweating like I was trying to make weight for Vision Quest.
I was not a wrestler. I was not in Vision Quest. I was just a teenager wrapped in plastic.
And at the time, this seemed completely reasonable. That may be my favorite thing about trends.
While you are inside them, they rarely look ridiculous. They look important. Sometimes they even become status symbols.
Kids know this instinctively. Right now it’s Squishmallows.
If your child does not own approximately 400 stuffed animals shaped like breakfast foods, creatures, and emotional-support bananas by the end of summer, you start wondering whether you have somehow failed as a parent.
“How many Squishmallows does Emma have?”
“Two hundred.”
“Oh.”
You say “Oh” the way people discuss college savings. Because it is never just the thing. It becomes evidence. That we belong.
That we know what everyone else knows. That our kids aren’t missing out. That we aren’t missing out.
Yesterday, I was perfectly happy without the thing. Then I saw six people with the thing. Now I am wondering why I do not have the thing.
Apparently human beings are very vulnerable to the possibility that everyone else has received a memo we somehow missed.
Maybe ten years from now we will all be walking backward in weighted sauna vests, balancing on Segways, stacking cups, and breathing through one nostril because some podcast says it improves mitochondrial resilience.
And if enough people are doing it, I will probably wonder if I should too. Maybe I don’t need a weighted vest. Maybe I just need to take the walk.
Which, now that I think about it, is probably what somebody said right before buying a Segway. ❤️
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