Last week I walked into this gym I had been a member of and said “I’d like to cancel my membership.” The manager, who I had spoken to several months prior quickly took over the interaction at the front desk.

A little background is relevant here. I joined this treadmill and tricep machine gym in the winter last year to have somewhere to run when it was too cold and icy outside. In the spring when I went in to cancel, I got the usual “Well why don’t you just suspend your account until fall, and then you might need it again.” I didn’t really want to do that as I knew exactly how it would play out, but I went along with it. The manager emailed me a follow-up and said what day I’d be billed again in the fall.

Because my bike got stolen a few weeks ago I put off the slightly-longer-than-walking-distance trip to finalize the cancellation, and so while I was at the tanning workshop the week before I missed the billing date. You got me globo gym, fair enough. I wasn’t going to ask for a refund on those dues, they pickpocketed me fair and square.

So you can imagine how I felt when the manager said, “Well, you were just billed and normally it’s a 60-day notice to cancel but you’ll just be billed one more time.”

I replied, “Look you got me with the whole suspend-and-then-cancel-it-later deal, you got one more payment out of me, I’m not asking for a refund, but if you think you’re billing me again for something I’m clearly not using you’re out of your mind.”

Her reply? “Sorry I don’t make the policies.”

I lost my shit. I won’t repeat my diatribe here, but suffice to say I pointed out that this is why people hate the gym industry, no one knows 60-days ahead of time that they want to cancel a gym membership, and if they really wanted to push it I’d walk out right then and charge it back on my card. She relented and literally said “Ok, you win, you’re all set.”

I think I was particularly incensed because of this article in the New Yorker I had read the same day. I highly recommend you read it. But if you don’t, here’s the tl;dr version of it: Some bottom-feeding scumbags have figured out that they can use perfectly legal methods to take over the lives of elderly people and essentially strip mine the value left in their lives. They steal whatever capital they have left and lock them up in institutions who collect payment from their own estates to hold them in captivity. It’s one of the sickest schemes I’ve ever heard of and it’s all perfectly legal.

Everyone is in on it. From the “guardians” who perpetrate the scams, to the lawyers and judges who stamp it with the legitimacy of the legal system, to the employees and managers of the nursing homes who collect their paychecks knowing full well who’s footing the bill.

In both of these cases, the trivial case of my $50 gym membership, and the millions of dollars and lives destroyed by these scammers you have people who “Don’t make the policies” and are just doing their jobs.

At some point people have to stand up and decide that they won’t be part of an exploitative system. What if the gym manager said to her bosses, “Sorry, I don’t feel ethical charging people for 2 months of membership they don’t want”? What if the owners or managers of the nursing home refused to accept business from these “guardians” who had stolen the lives of these elderly folks?

Let me be clear on this, as you’re probably wondering “Hey, you own a gym, do you put your money where your mouth is?” We gave up on contracts years ago because I was never willing to hold anyone to the contract. I won’t do refunds, but I’ll cancel a membership any time up to the day before the billing date, no questions asked. It’s simply the right thing to do, and as a bonus I don’t put any of my employees in the shitty position of having to say “Sorry, it’s the policy, I don’t make the rules.”

I think it’s good business to do things this way, but I also think it’s being good people.

Bottom line is that systems, good ones and bad ones, are made up of parts and people. It can only take one good person to break a bad system.

If you’ve spent even a moment learning about Native American culture it’s impossible not to have it impressed upon you how much of the animals they hunted were used, which is to say, literally every bit of it.

There seems to be almost a de-evolution over time in terms of how much of animals we let go to waste.

For example, our grandparents may not have worn buckskin clothing, but they certainly ate organ meat.

When is the last time you ate organ meat? Did you know that it’s potentially one of the single most beneficial things you could add back into your diet? Eating as much muscle meat (exclusively) as we modern humans, and especially westerners do is neither normal nor healthy. Including organ meats is one way to balance the amino acids and improve the nutrition profile of your diet. (By the way, I wrote up my chicken liver pate recipe, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t love it.)

And so on as you go back in history. Of course the more we waste, the worse things are for the planet and the worse things tend to be for us – who live best in concert with the planet not just extracting from it.

One of the things that always bothered me when I’ve hunted deer is that the hide goes to waste. I don’t know what the processor does with it, but I’d wager they don’t use it and I never asked to keep it since I didn’t know how to tan it.

So the next few days I’m going back to the woods to learn traditional brain tanning, which is using animal brains rather than harsh chemicals to break down the proteins in hide and make soft and usable leather.

I may not switch to wearing buckskin clothing, but knowing that I can use another part of the animal I’ve taken from the Earth is really important to me and is another skill in the quiver that could have who-knows-what benefits down the road.