The Only Thing AI Can't Outsource
And why Running Clubs feel like the new religion now
A few weeks ago, I stopped at a red light in Berlin and briefly assumed I had walked into an advanced breathing workshop.
About thirty people were standing next to me on the sidewalk. Nobody was talking. Nobody was scrolling. Instead, they were staring straight ahead, inhaling and exhaling with suspicious intensity, as if oxygen had just become a luxury commodity.
They were wearing sneakers that looked like limited editions and outfits that suggested a very serious relationship with the concept of “performance.” For a moment, I considered whether this was a startup ritual, a biohacking experiment, or the early phase of a very polite rebellion.
Then the light turned green.
They started running.
Only later did I realize what I had witnessed: not chaos, not coincidence, but a running club.
At first, I laughed about it. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like a strangely accurate metaphor for the time we are living in.
Artificial intelligence is usually described as a technology that makes life easier. It writes texts, summarizes documents, structures thoughts, and increasingly behaves like a hyperintelligent assistant with infinite patience.
But AI is not just a productivity tool. It is a machine that quietly rearranges the hierarchy of what still counts as human effort.
For most of modern history, intelligence was scarce:
Thinking well required time, discipline, and a certain tolerance for loneliness.
Today, cognitive power is becoming cheap, externalized, and permanently available. The mind, once the ultimate status symbol, is slowly turning into infrastructure.
And when intelligence becomes infrastructure, something else becomes scarce.
Your body.
You can ask an AI to optimize your life with frightening precision. It can design your diet, rewrite your emails, structure your arguments, and generate a five-year plan that makes your current existence look statistically irresponsible.
But it cannot sleep for you.
It cannot calm your nervous system.
It cannot metabolize your stress, your coffee, or your existential doubts.
The body refuses automation.
This is why health has suddenly become more than a lifestyle trend. It is turning into a form of existential self-defense. In a world where thinking is increasingly delegated to machines, the body becomes the last domain where you are still undeniably involved.
Running clubs are the purest expression of this shift.
They are not just about fitness. They are social spaces built around something that cannot be outsourced. No one can run for you. No algorithm can experience the strange mixture of pain, clarity, and mild self-criticism that emerges somewhere between kilometer two and your last life decision. Running is effort without proxy, authenticity with elevated heart rate.
Seen from this angle, the rise of running clubs is not just a trend – it is a collective reaction. Highly educated, hyperconnected people gather in aesthetically coordinated groups to perform the most primitive activity imaginable, only to later upload the evidence to platforms built by the very technologies they are trying to psychologically escape.
It is both ridiculous and deeply rational.
Historically, societies invested in the mind because the mind was the engine of progress. In the age of artificial intelligence, that logic is being inverted. Cognitive ability is becoming abundant, scalable, and increasingly detached from individual effort. Physical resilience, emotional stability, and disciplined attention, by contrast, remain stubbornly personal and painfully slow.
If AI becomes the external mind of civilization, then health becomes the internal capital of the individual.
A few days after the scene at the red light, I passed the same intersection again.
This time, I recognized the pattern immediately. The silence. The synchronized breathing. The subtle tension in their posture, as if they were not just waiting for a traffic signal, but for permission to remain physical in a world optimized for machines.
When the light turned green, they ran again (clearly another running club), perfectly organized, slightly overmotivated, and existentially convincing.
For a brief moment, I felt something unexpected – not admiration, not envy, but clarity. Somewhere, machines were thinking, writing, optimizing, and predicting the future with terrifying efficiency.
But here, at least, there were still people who could not outsource the fact that they had to move their own bodies through physical space.
And suddenly, the scene no longer looked like a cult, or even a trend.
It looked like something quieter and more fundamental:
a collective attempt to reclaim what cannot be delegated.
Not intelligence. Not productivity.
But health – in the broadest sense of the word.
The health of the body, which must be carried by no one but ourselves.
And the health of the inner life, which no machine can inhabit on our behalf.
Perhaps this is what the age of artificial intelligence is slowly teaching us:
When thinking becomes abundant, it is the state of our bodies and the coherence of our inner world that quietly become the last measure of what it means to be alive.