I
The first sauna I ever went to was in Berlin with a good friend who lived there at the time. We had met in London years before. It was my first time ever being completely naked for a prolonged period of time with a) random male and female strangers (outside of changing rooms), b) a close friend, and c) Germans. But there I was, naked and sweaty in a series of small rooms with all three.
At one point a man dressed like a life guard came in and began performing what I was told was a scheduled event whereby water is thrown over the coals to significantly raise the temperature. My friend instructed me to sit on the bottom or middle bench, asking me if I was sure I wanted to do it. I said it was fine. The overly animated life guard began to more or less chant (in German, which I don’t understand) and the crowd that had packed into the fairly small space began to sway, heaving to and fro as the heat grew. A fat older lady was next to me and her body rubbed against me to the rhythm of the ritual, a slight moaning emanating from her along with the others. The guttural sounds of the staff member, now transformed into a high priest of some sort, encouraged this behaviour, goaded it along, and as the degrees went up, I couldn’t help worrying that I’d accidentally tripped into one of Goya’s hellish depictions.
For those three or four days in Berlin, my stomach had become stuck. I couldn’t shit, no matter what I tried, even using German laxatives. It was nerves, I’m sure, because that’s how it’s always been since I can remember. The gut and all the tubes leading in and out of it seize up in pain, and I’d get constipated. Hours on the bench outside of the principal’s office. An inability to shit at my cousin’s house, my aunt locking me in the bathroom to make me until, as always happened, she applied an anema. Middle-aged, now the effect of nerves on my stomach is the opposite: diarrhea. Whatever the cause was that visit, the sauna on that bitterly cold day in Berlin had helped me to relax and, ultimately, have a glorious shit.
II
I was happy to find out that where I work, a university, has a sauna in the men’s locker room. I don’t go very often, but there are times when it’s exactly what I need. It’s nowhere as nice as the one in Berlin and often breaks down. It also reflects the fear Americans have of nudity, so the men who use it will wear anything from t-shirts and shorts to what I do, which is just cover up with a towel. I keep it simple there: twenty minutes, then a cold shower. But, by far, the worst thing about it are the college kids; specifically the work-out bros, who use it to prep for lifting.
A few weeks ago, I came down with a chest infection and went to the sauna to find relief. Campus had emptied for the holidays and I was looking forward to having the very small room all to myself, bro-free. And that was the case for the first ten minutes.
I can’t tell if young men in their twenties in the early 21st century shave off all their hair or if it hasn’t come in yet, but many of the guys I see in the gym have absolutely no body hair. It makes me a grovelling creature of the woods, pimpled and beady-eyed as I might be in my gaze. The hairless bro who broke my peace that day had on underwear and socks, no shirt. He brandished in his hand a smartphone. It was ringing. It was on speaker.
His mother wanted to know which gym he was at today. He told her which one. The other one is for power-lift days, Ma. He’s just doing some cardio today before coming home.
Mom: What time? Bro: Six-ish. Mom: You still want to have burgers? Bro: Uh, no. I’ll just do one of my preparations so I have that for next week. Mom: Long silence. Some muttering. Bro: Is that OK? Mom: More silence. Then: Sure, that’s fine. I just thought you wanted to have burgers. Bro: We can have them next week or something.
And then the call ended, and with it I hoped so would the fucking rude, thoughtless intrusion. But no. Bro then takes his phone and plays a podcast on speaker.
Podcast host: I’m not trying to sell anything to you, you know how I am, but my new energy bar really does some pretty fantastic things if you’re looking to take advantage of that max period during sleep to bulk up. Here’s what I do: Mash up one of my bars and leave it to soak in a glass over night. The chia seeds will turn it into a gel-like substance, let’s just call it a gel, that will power you through the night. Today I’m gonna talk about gels, actually, and how the [INSERT NATIVE MEXICAN TRIBE NAME] peoples were able to run marathons and hunt. So what I’m doing is talking to experts in paleo-cuisine to breakdown what these superfoods were that [INSERT NATIVE MEXICAN TRIBE NAME] ate, as well as other early peoples around the world. And sorry, guys, you know I never like to promote stuff, but I have to share with you an awesome product that I have been using. It’s a machine that emits stabilizing frequencies that—get this—equilibrate your ions. I have one in my bedroom and office, because those are places where my body is at rest most and need this important treatment….
He jumped through this podcast and a few videos with the same host (telling by the voice), and this went on for the rest of my time in the sauna. Annoyed looks were pointless. Bro was oblivious to anything beyond his immediate concerns. Like the worst spy in the world, I was able to determine that the uber-masculine man, who may as well be called Paleo Man, that Bro was listening to was considered by Bro-like men to be an expert on body fitness, using some noble-savage idea of early tribal communities to uncover hacks and tricks for exercise and eating. In a far more subtle way, though, Paleo Man had created a practical philosophy, a virtual fantasy world, for Bro that he could inhabit as a supplement to his everyday life. By pinning all personal problems on the excesses of consumerism or bad-eating or Lazy People Who Don’t Know How to Survive, he is creating for his audience a framework for feeling important, in-the-know, and superior. It occurred to me while listening in on Bro that consumption has dramatically evolved over the past decade: We consume so much more than products and “signifiers of affluence” (Jean Beaudrillard), but meaning of the deepest kind, a reason to keep on living and to not die.
III
At this point, I’ll leave whoever the real person Bro is behind, and carry on with my caricature. (I hope he eventually had those burgers with his mother, she really seemed disappointed by that.) The way in which Bro engages with content goes beyond a purely practical dimension. The problem he is solving requires more of his emotions and thoughts than a broken door handle would when considering what tool to buy to fix it. A hammer could be critiqued as a symbol of a certain ideology, but I think that would be superfluous, pointless critique. Hammers exist across belief systems, time periods, states of mind, etc. What Bro is consuming can only exist now, and specifically in the exact parameters—class, race, gender, nation, etc.—that Bro occupies. The easy mixing of New Age gadgetry with seeming science and anthropology worries me. These are all notions that carry truth to most people, so easy tools with which to convince someone of their most fundamental trust. Ultimately, Bro trusts Paleo Man and what he says, the content he produces. It’s a trust that reflects a religious faith because it expects the same thing: an explanation for why things are, what they mean, and what one should do to live a life in accordance with those principles.
Consumption reflects religious instruction, but not (solely) on account of the veracity of commodification or the gullibility of consumers (us). Instead, I think, it is about the use of coincidence. To this day, coincidence remains the most magical phenomenon. It blows my mind to think that I ran into this one person on this day at this time just when I was thinking of them. I know deep down that coincidence can be explained by something in the way our brains work, but that doesn’t lessen the feeling it creates.
Religion frames coincidence within its explanations, providing answers to the sense of wonder that the coincidental creates in people. Capitalism does something quite different: It engineers coincidence to exploit that wonder. The experience of the coincidental opens up something within us that makes us more trusting, malleable. The entire logic whereby sales displays are designed and placed in a grocery store, say, are there to coincide with feelings and thoughts shoppers might be feeling at that time of year. The digital world has only pushed this to new heights: Our searches, things we say in earshot of an AI device, email communications, social media likes all provide data to companies seeking to create coincidental experiences to supplement our increasingly mediated lives through consumption reflecting our inner most values and beliefs.
IV
Bro might be a useful idiot for this observation, but the best one is always myself. The return of socialism has come with a content life world not unlike what Bro was hooked into. Maybe I’m the same as him, just a different flavour. Of course I can’t speak for others, but I wonder how much of what I believe to be my politics is really just what I consume and take to be a meaningful framework for living. Marx, I don’t think, intended to provide a philosophy for everyday living, but for the historical process through which our human world emerged and continues to emerge. Whatever that material-social process might be, we still experience the world as individuals negotiating the emotions that come with difficulty, shocks, loss, fear, and much else. Socialism and capitalism, like Islam and Christianity, arrive after the party is over, after what was already there has happened: our most fundamental relationship with the world, our interactions with other people, which are fundamentally coincidental. Meaning systems and explanations may describe, nurture, or exploit that condition, that of community, family, and friendship, but they aren’t its primary source.