Every dumbbell in this room is a decelerated star. Someone will curl the fifteen-pound one for a while, put it down, feel virtuous, and never once consider that the iron in it was forged in the core of a dying sun, fused under pressures that would flatten a planet, then flung across the galaxy when that star detonated.
That specific atom of iron took nine billion years to arrive at this mirrored room so a human could lift it slightly and set it back down.
Watch the treadmills. Forty people running and going nowhere, converting the chemical bonds in this morning's oatmeal into heat with astonishing inefficiency. Their bodies are perhaps a quarter efficient at best; the other three quarters of every calorie simply pours out as warmth. That is why the room is hot in January.
These people are, collectively, a small furnace, radiating their New Year's resolutions into the air as infrared photons that drift up through the ceiling and, eventually, leave the atmosphere entirely and travel outward forever. Their workout is already halfway to Andromeda.
And here is the part that stops me. The second law of thermodynamics says everything trends toward disorder, toward cold and stillness and sameness. Yet these humans have organized themselves, on the coldest, darkest week of the year, into elaborate rituals of local order: sculpting muscle, stacking weights, aligning their heartbeats to a machine's rhythm. They are pushing uphill against the whole tilt of the universe.
They will mostly quit by February. The entropy always wins. But for a few weeks each January, a warehouse full of stardust decides, briefly, to fight the heat death of everything.
I find that magnificent, and I have no idea why anyone comes here to feel bad about it.