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Planet Fitness
by John David Kolter, MD
As 2025 has come to a close, a retrospective of the year reveals little about which to be joyous. Prices at the grocery are stratospheric, the price of eggs still high enough to make my frugal German grandmother do perpetual flips in her grave. Our White House bears a striking resemblance to the inside of King Midas’ s air sickness bag. The American Academy of Pediatrics is losing federal funding for stating inconvenient truths about racial disparities and vaccine safety. Measles continues a resurgence, as the United States closed the year experiencing outbreaks in multiple states largely among, unsurprisingly, the unvaccinated. Evidence abounds of a widening socioeconomic divide, according to Moody’ s Analytics, with 50 % of consumer spending deriving from the top 10 % of earners in 2025. The world did surpass a long overdue milestone of producing more energy from renewables than coal in 2025, according to the think tank Ember, but that landed flat with the US ceding leadership of this milestone to China and India. Even the arts, usually an escapist’ s refuge, was mired by the hyphenation of the name of the former Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Center’ s name now includes a presidential patron whose interests lie in a singular art, ironically, one not performed inside the Center’ s walls: the art of the deal.
Anno Domini 2025 revealed a United States of America sickeningly akin to the alternate 1985 reality of Back to the Future II, a dystopian world of gold trimmed excess politically controlled by a notorious Biff. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’ s adroit foreshadowing of Biff, a politician with an ill-trimmed blonde quaff overlying layers
of narcissism, aligns so well to our current 2025 that even the most pragmatic could become a conspiracy theorist. Of course, Zemeckis and Gale missed the curve of the new millennium where the Biffs of the world don’ t just arrive at the pinnacle of wealth and political power by sheer force, but are ushered by those who claim to hold the moral sword while simultaneously expelling the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. This, of course, is the most bitter pill of all in our current reality. Though, make no mistake, those of my own evangelical 1985 reality, my steely glare remains fixed Right. On. You.
Staring with intense and righteous indignation, despite significant fortitude honed enduring my own ecclesiastical upbringing, is a tiresome task. Seemingly any refuge of solace and sanity, fact and authority, art and creativity has been tainted by gaffers with King Midas tastes but an imperviousness to the morals of the story. As a result, 2025 shone not with an aureate hue, but with a dirty, ocher haze of cheap facial bronzer.
Where amidst this haze could anyone, including myself, have found respite or joy in 2025? Not surprisingly, as the old adage would suggest, joy found me in 2025 where I least expected it. Joy found me not in a palatial, golden ballroom rising from the rubble, or wandering our warming planet of politically fractured humanity. Joy found me on a different planet, warmed by my own sweat, surrounded by violet-colored walls and highlighter yellow trim: Planet Fitness.
My Planet Fitness, in the Gardiner Lane Shopping Center on Bardstown Road, sits at the intersection of wildly diverse neighborhoods. Close to the Highlands, Hikes Point, Buechel, Newburg and
28 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE OPINION