Books are the new athleisure

Musing #3 | plus Twitter/X goes Substack, and Apple's Vision Pro

🗝️ Greetings fellow theorists — this is a patron-only edition of Working Theorys where I share my rough drafts — more casual and candid mini-essays about top of mind themes.

---

#1 Books are the new athleisure

Athleisure became ever more prominent during COVID, and I’d argue much of “business casual” attire has now been replaced by business athleisure attire.¹ (Afterall, Lululemon even has designated work pants.) The critique or satire of traditional athleisure of course is that most people who wear it aren’t actually doing something athletic, whether in that moment or as a broader lifestyle.

But this is one of my favorite rationalizations about athleisure:

Athleisure broadcasts your commitment to controlling your body through working out. And to even get into a pair of Lululemons, you have to have a disciplined-looking body. (The founder of the company once said that “certain women” aren’t meant to wear his brand.) “Self-exposure and self-policing meet in a feedback loop,” Weigel wrote. “Because these pants only ‘work’ on a certain kind of body, wearing them reminds you to go out and get that body.”²

So why do I say that books are the new athleisure?

Everyone wants to be seen holding one but only a few are actually reading them.

And regardless of whether people are even reading them (it’s obviously hard to prove), I think the desire to read has increasingly come from the desire to seem like someone who reads, like someone who is well-read. Maybe this isn’t new, but it’s definitely having a revival — a kind of post-digital-media-saturation hobby, self-help trend, and virtue signal all in one.

While many people still discover books by word of mouth, there are more and more ways books are being marketed directly and indirectly. There’s the Goodreads push for book goals per year, the rise of booktok and booktube for younger generations, and every celebrity or influencer writing their own book too. Books are a high brow, aspirationally-intellectual product to sell and to buy and to broadcast.

Is this necessarily a bad thing if the net result is that more people do read? I guess that depends on how noble you think it is. Most people, many smart people, say reading a lot is an invaluable endeavor. But of course it depends what you are reading — the “healthy food” or “junk food” of books as it were. But much like athleisure, if looking the part helps you be the part, then maybe it’s net good.

One of my favorite recent finds that speaks so unbelievably well to this idea:

#2 Twitter goes Substack with “articles”

A painful thing with writing of late has been my inability to just share links on Twitter. Ever since Substack launched its “Notes” feature — the native short-form posting feature that’s an awful lot like Tweets — it’s become product-non-grata to Twitter.³ Just mentioning the word “Substack” or sharing a Substack link will get your Twitter / X post aggressively shadow banned.⁴