My landlord raised my rent by $140 a month starting in October. I know this because I got the email, read it twice, said a word I won’t repeat here, and then went to my 6am training session four hours later and paid my trainer $150 for a single hour of him watching me do goblet squats. Nobody made me do this. I did the math myself, sitting on the train, and the trainer costs more per session than the rent increase costs per month. I have been chewing on that fact for two weeks like it’s a piece of gum that lost its flavor a while ago but I can’t stop.
Here’s the thing that makes this complicated instead of just stupid.
Rent is not optional. The trainer is extremely optional. And yet I have not canceled the trainer, I have thought about canceling my apartment search instead, which tells you something about where my priorities have quietly relocated to without asking my permission first.
The math I didn’t want to do, and did anyway
Twice a week, $150 a session, comes out to $1,200 a month. The rent increase is $140. So we’re not talking about a close call here, we’re talking about a personal trainer that costs almost nine times more than the thing I’m supposedly furious about. I said this out loud to my downstairs neighbor in the laundry room, unprompted, and she just looked at me like I’d confessed to a crime, because I basically had.
So why did the rent increase feel like the injustice, and the trainer feel like a Tuesday? I think it’s because rent is a number someone else assigns to me. It’s imposed. I open the email, I have no input, I just absorb the number and feel small. The trainer is a number I chose, every single session, twice a week, with my own hand tapping “confirm” on an app. Choosing to spend money apparently feels completely different from being told to spend money, even when the choosing costs way, way more.
That’s not a math problem, that’s a psychology problem, and once I saw it that way I stopped being able to pretend the trainer was some neutral, obviously justified expense sitting outside the conversation. It’s not outside the conversation. It’s the biggest number in the conversation. I just hadn’t been counting it as a number, I’d been counting it as a decision I made once, a long time ago, that didn’t need re-checking.
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The other thing I noticed, once I actually sat with the spreadsheet instead of avoiding it: I’ve had this trainer for fourteen months. Fourteen. Do you know how many pairs of end of season boots I could have bought with what I’ve spent keeping one guy watching me lift a kettlebell? I do. I counted. It’s an amount that made me close the laptop and go make tea instead of finishing the thought.
What I’m actually paying for, and whether it’s fine
So is it worth it. That’s the actual question, and I want to be honest that I didn’t come into this with an answer, I came into it annoyed and looking for permission to either quit or keep going, and math alone doesn’t hand you that permission, it just hands you the number.
What I’ve landed on, after actually thinking about it instead of just being mad about rent, is that the trainer isn’t really priced against the gym membership I’m not using or the yoga app I deleted. It’s priced against the eight years I spent not going to any gym at all, quietly hurting my back picking things up wrong, and telling myself I’d start “properly” once I had more time, which never came, obviously, because it never does. The $150 isn’t buying an hour of squats. It’s buying the fact that I show up at 6am on a Tuesday when every fiber of my body wants to stay under the blanket, because someone is standing there and I already paid and I hate wasting money more than I hate being tired. That’s the actual product. Accountability with a price tag on it, because it turns out I don’t respond to promises I make to myself, I respond to promises I make to my bank account.
Is that a good use of $1,200 a month. Genuinely, I don’t fully know, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve reached some tidy verdict just because I wrote a few hundred words about it. What I do know is that comparing it to the rent increase was the wrong comparison from the start, they’re not the same category of expense, one’s a fixed cost of existing in my apartment and the other is a fixed cost of me existing as a person who doesn’t want to throw her back out at thirty four.
Comparing them just made me feel guilty in a way that wasn’t actually about money, it was about the discomfort of watching myself spend big on optional things while acting like the involuntary ones are the real threat.
Maybe this is just me finding an elaborate justification for something I was never going to quit anyway. No, actually, wait, I’ve genuinely thought about it, and I think it holds. I think the number only looks absurd next to a rent increase because rent increases feel unfair and trainers feel indulgent, and those are two totally different feelings about money doing all the work, not the actual dollar amounts. Once I stopped feeling and started counting, the trainer made sense to me in a way the rent increase never will, because the rent increase buys me nothing new, it just costs more for the same box I already had. The trainer, infuriatingly, keeps earning its keep every single week. I still think $150 an hour is a lot of money. I paid it again yesterday.
