My TikTok algorithm has recently decided that I am, apparently, a gym bro.
This is not entirely TikTok’s fault. Over the past year, I’ve been working on my health and losing weight. I’m down a little over forty pounds now, with another thirty or so to go before reaching my first goal. Along the way, I’ve found myself enjoying other people’s weight-loss journeys. Someone posts that they’ve lost fifty pounds, started riding every morning, changed the way they eat, whatever—I’m probably going to give them a like or leave an encouraging comment.
TikTok noticed. And TikTok, being TikTok, did what algorithms do. It gave me more.
Unfortunately, somewhere in the algorithmic taxonomy, middle-aged man trying to become healthier apparently shares a border with twenty-two-year-old shirtless man screaming motivational phrases into his phone. So now, periodically, a young man whose frontal lobe has not yet received its final software update appears on my screen to inform me that it is time to LOCK IN.
And here’s the embarrassing part: it’s kind of working.
Not because I suddenly want to adopt the entire surrounding culture. I have no plans to start calling everyone “king,” filming myself flexing under fluorescent bathroom lighting, or developing strong opinions about which flavor of creatine represents my personal brand. But sometimes I hear lock in in my head when morning comes and I don’t particularly feel like getting on the stationary bike.
And then I get on the bike.
Which got me thinking about wolves.
There is an old story many of us heard as children about two wolves living inside each of us. One represents our better tendencies and the other our worse ones. The wolves are constantly fighting, and when a child asks which wolf wins, the answer is: the one you feed. I’ve always liked the story. But lately I’ve been thinking about it differently, because I don’t experience myself as containing two wolves. I have a committee.
There are a lot of versions of me sitting around a metaphorical table at any given moment: the health-conscious guy who would very much like this body to remain operational for a long time; the pleasure-seeker who would like to remind everyone that pizza exists; the father; the husband; the philosopher; the absurdist; the anxious one; the ambitious one; the lazy bastard who thinks we have accomplished quite enough for one day; the guy who wants to meditate; the guy who thinks buying another weird object might somehow improve our lives.
And somewhere behind all of them is what I sometimes think of as the passenger—the experience of being “me” while this strange biological machine and its competing impulses negotiate what happens next.
I don’t think the committee metaphor works exactly like the wolves. I’m not trying to starve certain members until they disappear. I’m not even convinced I would want to. Instead, I’ve started thinking about media consumption as a way of giving different committee members rhetoric.
What we consume gives particular voices better arguments.
The TikTok gym bros aren’t creating the health-conscious member of my committee. He was already sitting there. They’re handing him pamphlets. Suddenly he has slogans, stories, before-and-after photos, examples of people who did the thing, tiny emotional narratives about discipline and consistency. He comes into the next committee meeting better prepared.
Gentlemen, I know we’d rather stay in bed, but I would once again like to remind everyone that we need to lock the fuck in.
Motion carries. We get on the bike.
This strikes me as meaningfully different from simply saying that “social media influences us.” Of course it influences us. Everything influences us. The more interesting question is: Which part of you becomes more articulate because of what you’re consuming?
That question changes how I think about media entirely. Instead of asking whether a particular piece of media is good or bad for me, I can ask: Who walks into tomorrow’s committee meeting better prepared because I watched this? That feels much closer to my actual experience. And it also creates an interesting wrinkle in something I’ve been thinking and writing about for years: Mirror Theory.
At its simplest, Mirror Theory is my way of thinking about how we encounter ourselves through everything around us. People are mirrors. Relationships are mirrors. Experiences are mirrors. The things that irritate us, inspire us, frighten us, attract us, and repel us reveal something about the person doing the looking.
Social media creates a particularly strange hall of mirrors because the mirrors watch us looking back.
I respond to a mirror. The algorithm notices. It gives me more mirrors resembling that one. Those mirrors strengthen a particular voice within my committee. That voice influences my behavior. My behavior changes what I respond to. The algorithm notices again.
I respond to the mirror → the mirror changes → I change → my changed self responds to different mirrors.
Around and around we go. The observer and the environment recursively shape one another.
This is where the silly TikTok story wanders into much deeper philosophical territory for me, because I don’t believe in free will in the traditional sense. I don’t think there is a little captain somewhere behind my eyes independently making decisions outside the causal machinery of the universe. The passenger isn’t steering the car in quite the way it feels like it is.
Genes matter. Childhood matters. Culture matters. Hormones matter. Sleep matters. The conversation you had yesterday matters. The video you watched ten minutes ago matters. The twenty-two-year-old yelling LOCK IN apparently matters. We are embedded in an incomprehensibly large network of causes continuously producing the next moment.
But this is where determinism becomes far more interesting to me than fatalism, because one of the things inside that causal network is our ability to alter the environment that will cause us next.
I may not be some supernatural agent standing outside causality and choosing myself from scratch, but I can participate in the conditions that produce the next version of me. I can put my shoes by the bike the night before. I can keep healthier food in the house. I can spend time with people who bring particular qualities out of me. I can read things that give the philosopher better language. I can expose myself to art that wakes up the creative member. I can meditate and give the quieter voices a chance to speak. And apparently I can accidentally train TikTok to send motivational gym bros into the committee chambers.
None of this escapes causality.
It is causality.
The system has become complicated enough to observe itself and begin altering its own future inputs. That may be one of the places where something resembling agency survives inside determinism—not as freedom from causes, but as participation in them.
And this is also where I think the wolf story deserves a little more generosity than I’ve given it. Maybe feeding the wolf was never really about destroying part of ourselves. Maybe feeding is simply another word for reinforcement.
Attention matters. Environment matters. Repetition matters. Stories matter. The rhetoric surrounding us eventually becomes some of the rhetoric inside us.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply, Which wolf are you feeding?
Maybe it’s: Who are you giving ammunition to?
Who gets stronger arguments from the books you read? Who gets emotional reinforcement from the people you follow? Who gets terrified by the news you consume? Who becomes angrier? Kinder? More suspicious? More hopeful? More disciplined? More ridiculous?
What voices are you training to become persuasive?
Because tomorrow morning the committee will meet again. Everyone will bring whatever they’ve gathered. The pleasure-seeker will have a presentation. The anxious one will have seventeen tabs open. The philosopher will insist that none of this is technically happening to a stable self anyway. The absurdist will make an inappropriate joke.
And somewhere at the end of the table, the health-conscious guy will quietly clear his throat. He’ll hold up his little TikTok pamphlet and, God help me, he’ll say:
Gentlemen.
It’s time to lock in.