Is there someone you haven’t seen this month? Maybe a friend stopped answering your calls; maybe a colleague disappeared with no trace besides a suspicious set of footprints leading to the local gym. Perhaps you wandered down a desolate path and came across a stray pair of tracksuit bottoms and a muddied copy of Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO.
You might have missed something big. For certain strivers, 1 October marked the start of the “Winter Arc”. Influencers want you to vanish from public view and turn the cold months into a fitness montage from a nightmarish martial arts film. Christmas will make everyone else round, sluggish and poor. You will blindside them, bounding into spring with a beach body and an investment portfolio. You will take their partners. And their jobs.
One YouTube video has been up for two weeks and already has a quarter of a million views. “You know those anime training arcs where the main character disappears into the mountains, trains in brutal conditions and comes back unrecognisable?” goes an AI voiceover. “That’s what winter is for in real life. While everyone else is making excuses and waiting for spring, you’ll be grinding in silence.”
The voice tells us to develop discipline, exercise, take cold showers, and do “ten to 15 minutes of meditation or breath work daily.” Clips from The Wolf of Wall Street surface on the screen. We are also asked to read for at least 30 minutes a day (“Self-development, philosophy, biographies of people who’ve done what you want to do”) and to keep a journal. (“This isn’t diary nonsense. This is tracking your mental growth like you’d track your physical progress.”) There’s an entrepreneurial tendency, too. “Start something,” the video advises. “A side hustle, a project, a portfolio… start building something that could become bigger.”
The trend has spread almost everywhere. A TikTok influencer has filmed himself doing press-ups in a waterlogged playground over the sound of a newsreader talking about endurance athlete David Goggins. “Time for winter arc,” says the overlaid text. Another young man shaves his hair off on camera. “Imagine the look on their faces after this winter” goes one caption. It’s overlaid on a series of gym shots from one of the Rocky films.
Both men and women are supposed to go through the Winter Arc. When influencers target female audiences, the aesthetic is remarkably different. The text shifts into a non-threatening lowercase; the TikTok videos are full of pictures of smoothies and sliced avocados.
But the same impulse exists on both ends. “Kill the old you this winter” is overlaid on a video of a woman walking on her treadmill. A faceless influencer with very long nails writes herself a list of “Winter Arc Rules.” “Workout 5-6x a week,” it says, “hit protein goal daily. No fast food, no alcohol… cold showers daily.”
Follow the trend far back enough and you’ll find notes of sexual revenge. One TikTok video makes use of an already-viral street interview; a young woman drunkenly admits to cheating on her boyfriend. It wasn’t a good time, she says. But she would do it again. We hear a sound effect that sounds like a hundred screams overlaid on each other; the frame shakes as a muscular man trains in the gym. On the female side of Winter Arc TikTok, another young woman films herself lifting weights to the jarring strains of a dramatic remix of Sia’s Chandelier. “Building a body he’s never going to touch again,” says the caption.
“Disappear for six months,” goes an infographic on the self-improvement side of Pinterest. It outlines a ten-step routine including “Quit P*RN” and “Stop chasing GIRLS.” One implores viewers to “Find the beast within you. Throw yourself into pain… Train like a warrior. Work like a robot. Eat like a king.” Winter Arc enthusiasts find themselves in an overlap with victims of the 75 Hard, a fitness challenge so difficult that women aren’t really supposed to do it. Participants of 75 Hard are required to diet, avoid alcohol, complete two 45-minute workouts a day – one outside – and chase up the ordeal with just ten pages of a self-help book. (The inventor of the challenge recommends The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, The Law of Attraction, and his own work on “mental toughness”).
Sometimes it is hard to work out what the end goal is. One YouTube video in my recommendations queue placed several famous billionaires in a glowing tableau, as if they were the stars of a new Marvel film. The subtext was clear: go through enough Winter Arcs and you can be just like them. But this is impossible. The next billionaire-to-watch runs in more exclusive circles than you do; he is probably at Harvard Business School and not at your local gym, and he has most likely skipped the cold showers so he has more time to learn to squeeze the poor. If he “disappeared for six months” he would jeopardise his networking opportunities. Reading ten pages at a time of Atomic Habits will not turn you into Jeff Bezos.
Something deeper appears to lurk beneath this cult of discipline. Fitness freaks have always frolicked online, but the craze for monastic ghosting and “grinding” maps neatly onto the rise of TikTok, which takes the infinite feed to addictive new heights. It is no wonder we want to reinvent ourselves by force: too much internet makes you hate yourself. The apps are designed to erode self-control; the end-goal of all social media is to get you scrolling for hours when you don’t want to be. Existing plans fall apart quickly; serial procrastinators find themselves the worst off.
This critique isn’t particularly new: Madame Bovary got in trouble for reading too many novels. But at least she had a sense of narrative; if you’re online enough to know about these self-help trends, your life is probably already saturated by clips that are totally without order or context. A few years ago it was fashionable for young women on TikTok to claim they were the “main character” in their own lives. They really meant they were taking initiative and raising their self-confidence. But if there are few overarching stories in your life, it probably feels like a tempting prospect to create your own.
The Winter Arc goes to extreme lengths to achieve the same effect. The challenge only appeals because it is the sort of thing a samurai would undergo in a book. There’s a “Hero’s Journey” with setbacks and goals – there are pre-defined motives, and built-in enemies in ex-boyfriends and girlfriends. You can even dream up a conclusion ahead of time by imagining how people will respond to your new physique.
None of this is healthy. It is so antisocial that it tips over into a kind of condoned narcissism; if everyone did the Winter Arc we would shut down until December and become a nation joined in mutual suspicion and resentment. Take a moment out of the gym. Set down your copy of Think and Grow Rich and pick up a novel. Stop ghosting all your friends. Your crisis of discipline might really be a crisis of meaning.
[Further reading: How dating apps killed romance]
Content from our partners
Related
