Staying in Your Lane: On the Attention Economy and the Soul of Pilates

A client cancelled recently. It was a Tuesday morning. The session slot opened up unexpectedly and I had the time free. I did not open social media. I did not scroll through Pilates feeds or read about who was arguing with whom about the state of the industry. I picked up a brush and painted for an hour. It was one of the better hours of that week.

I am writing this because I have been receiving a particular kind of pressure lately — and I suspect I am not the only one. The message, delivered in various forms, is something like this: the Pilates world is getting out of control, studios are opening everywhere with inadequate training, the method is being diluted, and people who care about the work — people like me — are sitting on the fence doing nothing about it. We are failing the method. We are letting it down by our silence. We should be fighting for the soul of Pilates.

I want to respond to this carefully, because I do care about the work. I care more about it than most of what I have seen in those feeds. But I am not going to join that fight — and the reason is not indifference.

What the Machine Is Doing

I spent close to twenty years working in the digital industry as a programmer. I understand how these systems are built and what they are designed to do. Behind every feed, every notification, every piece of content that makes you feel urgent or outraged or guilty — there is an algorithm whose sole purpose is to capture and hold your attention. Not to inform you. Not to improve anything. To keep you looking at the screen so that a company can sell that attention to advertisers.

The "fight for the soul of Pilates" is perfect content for this machine. It has sides. It has stakes. It generates strong feelings. It makes people feel that their identity is attached to the outcome. It is, in the language of the industry, highly engaging. Every comment, every share, every person who feels compelled to respond because they were made to feel guilty for their silence — all of that is engagement, and engagement is the product.

There is a book called Who Moved My Cheese. The premise is simple — the cheese keeps moving and the mice keep running after it, often without stopping to question whether they should. The algorithms have become extraordinarily good at moving the cheese. Most people who are running do not realise someone is continuously repositioning it. I have spent enough time watching this happen to myself and to others that I no longer want to be one of the mice.

What Fighting for the Soul of Pilates Actually Looks Like

Joseph Pilates did not ask anyone to fight for his method on social media. He asked them to practice it, teach it well, and demonstrate its value in their own body and in the bodies of their students. That is what he wrote. That is the standard he held himself to.

I practice Pilates every day. I teach it to a small number of clients with the full apparatus, in private sessions, without compromise on the standards I was taught. I read his original texts regularly and return to them when I need to remember what the work is actually about. I attend industry events and continue to study. I have built a body of writing on this site that attempts to represent the method honestly — what it is, what it is not, what he actually claimed for it and what the industry has added without his authority.

That is how I fight for the soul of Pilates. Not by posting. By doing the work.

The Standing Question

There is a separate point worth making, beyond the question of where my attention goes. Even if I were inclined to fight publicly for what Pilates should and should not be, I do not have the standing to do so. Joseph Pilates did not appoint me. There is no evidence he appointed anyone else either.

I see arguments online that the industry needs regulation, that teacher training should be standardised, that social media posts about Pilates should carry disclaimers, that certain styles of teaching should be excluded from being called Pilates at all. Some of these arguments are made in good faith and address real concerns. Pilates is referred by doctors and physiotherapists, and if practitioners are injured by poor instruction, the wider perception of the method does suffer. That is a legitimate worry.

But the legitimacy of the worry does not give me the authority to act on it. Pilates is not trademarked. Anyone can teach whatever they want and call it Pilates. Trying to gatekeep the word — through public criticism, through campaigns for standardisation, through demands that others post in particular ways — is not meaningfully different from the trademark cases that were already fought and lost. The argument was settled. The word belongs to no one. That is the legal and practical reality, and pretending otherwise does not change it.

What teachers do in their own studios, with their own clients, is between them and their clients. If a client is injured by an unqualified teacher, the responsibility for that lies with the teacher and, in some sense, with the client who chose that teacher. It does not lie with me, sitting in a different studio, watching from outside. I have no role in that transaction and no authority over it. The most I can do is teach what I believe Pilates is, in the way I believe it should be taught, in my own studio. That is the full extent of my decision-making power. Anything beyond that is overreach.

This is not indifference to harm or to the future of the method. It is recognition of where my actual responsibility ends. The teachers I disagree with are not under my supervision. They never were. The fight to regulate them — however well-intentioned — assumes an authority that none of us actually has.

On Being Made to Feel Guilty

The statements that create guilt — you are on the fence, you are doing nothing, you should take sides — are themselves a feature of the attention economy, not a genuine moral claim. They are designed to provoke a response. Guilt is an effective lever. It makes people act without thinking clearly about whether the action serves them or serves the machine asking for it.

I have spent enough of my life responding to that lever. I spent years in the digital industry watching how content is engineered to produce exactly this feeling. I am not immune to it — but I have learned to recognise it. When I feel suddenly guilty for not posting, not engaging, not taking a public position on a polarising question, I now ask: who benefits from my participation in this? Usually the answer is not me, not my clients, and not the method I teach.

The people making these arguments are often themselves caught in the same system. They are not necessarily cynical — many genuinely believe the fight matters. But the form the fight takes, the medium it happens in, and the emotions it generates are all shaped by platforms that profit from conflict. Good intentions do not change that architecture.

What I Have Chosen Instead

I spend very little time with my phone or my machine beyond what the work requires. When a session is cancelled I do not fill the time with scrolling. I practice. I read. I paint, occasionally. I do things that return something to me rather than things that extract something from me.

This is not a critique of anyone who makes different choices. People navigate this differently and I do not think my way is the only valid one. But I have been asked, implicitly and explicitly, to feel ashamed of this approach — to feel that my quietness is a failure of commitment to something I care about deeply.

It is not. My commitment is expressed in the studio, in the sessions, in the writing on this site, and in the daily practice that keeps me honest about what the work actually requires. That commitment does not need to be performed on a platform that monetises the performance.

Joseph Pilates asked his students to practice faithfully, teach honestly, and demonstrate the value of the work in their own body. He did not ask them to win arguments on the internet. That standard is the one I am trying to meet — and it is enough to occupy a career.