Fit for Purpose

fit for purpose
adjective

1. Appropriate, and of a necessary standard, for its intended use.

“Fit for purpose” is an interesting concept. It applies mostly to buildings and stuff on the shelves at the Wallyworld, but I’d like to examine its extended definition to hoomans. What exactly, is a fit for purpose person? One size wouldn’t fit all. A kaleidoscope of different sorts of persons would be required to do various things. A veterinarian needs a different set of skills than a kindergarten teacher, for instance, although avoiding serious tissue damage from bites is important in both occupations.

I got to musing on this topic because it seems to me that very few people are fit for purpose for their various walks of life nowadays. In most cases, they’re selected on the basis of being manifestly unfit for purpose, on purpose. It’s easy to come up with examples, so I won’t belabor the topic with a list. But I’d like to show an example of how a lack of fit for purpose for humans is becoming camouflaged in places you might not go looking for it. Look at these two pictures:

One of these men is incredibly physically fit, and fit for purpose. The other goes to the gym all the time to alter his appearance, and probably isn’t fit for any purpose.

If you wanted to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, I suppose you could really stretch the definition of fit for purpose for the Work Hard dude.  He is fit for making tubby girls in office buildings sploosh a little bit if he shoots a healthcare CEO or something, but he’s not fit for any real work. He isn’t all that strong, and he’s probably not capable of performing any real physical labor, at least at a high level. I once had a gym rat working construction for me. Way bigger than this guy. Schwarzenegger-y. I made him a mason tender for my old uncle, who was on a waiting list for a heart transplant at the time. My uncle wore him out in four hours, and he refused to work with him again.

The second gent is Gene Tunney. Gene was fit for purpose, I tell you what. Gene Tunney was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He had 90 fights, and won 89 of them, including 2 against in-his-prime heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey.

Gymbro wants big pecs because he wants big pecs. It’s male version of a boob job using weights instead of dimethylpolysiloxane. So he suffers from sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, which means the muscle fibers expand to give him the appearance he wants, but there’s likely no meaningful increase in strength. He’s not particularly fit or strong, in the only ways that could matter.

Tunney knew about fitness, not just brawling. He was in the Marines during WWI, but never saw combat. He became the U.S. Expeditionary Forces boxing champion, however. After the war was over, he spent a year working as a lumberjack in Canada. He thought solitude and strenuous labor would help prepare him for a pro boxing career. Can you picture Mr. Work Hard as an Ontario lumberjack? Monty Python could.

When WWII rolled around, the Undersecretary of the Navy put Tunney in charge of the physical fitness for the Navy. What Tunney understood, long before creatine shakes and Nautilus equipment, was functional strength training. Functional strength is just another way to say fit for purpose.

Tunney wouldn’t have known what to call it, but he didn’t just want big boobs. They only get in the way, and increase the weight you have to carry around the ring, or the battlefield. He went for myofibrillar hypertrophy, which increases the density of muscles. That makes you stronger, leaner, and more efficient.

Tunney was more than just a great boxer. He was smart. Unlike many of his peers, he made a lot of money and kept most of it. He married a very rich socialite and had a batch of kids. He was considered an intellectual boxer, and an intellectual, too. No, really. He lectured at Yale on Shakespeare.

We need to make fit for purpose as the only qualification for any job, instead of, you know, the opposite thing. Our cars, houses, planes, trains, and automobiles should be fit for purpose, too, not just docking stations for iPhones.

And we also have to retire the recent gigachad meme. Gene Tunney was way more fit for that purpose, too: