By Vickram Agarwal on September 25, 2026 Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Why you paid for the gym but never went

By Vickram Agarwal on September 25, 2026 Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Some expenditures stand in for the work required to actually reach our goals. Think of those before you swipe your credit card.

I think I may have found the answer to why you have a gym membership but rarely go. But I wasn’t thinking about gym memberships when I stumbled onto the reason; I was thinking about something that recently happened at work.

I was on a call with a client, and the subject was how to get their customers to complete the onboarding process for services they had already signed up for. It turns out the struggle begins soon after people swipe their credit cards.

What makes this particularly interesting is that the sales process leading up to that swipe is intense. There are multiple back-and-forths, and prospective customers do a fair amount of internal work to determine if they’ll gain value from the service. By the time they sign up, they’ve made a fairly considered decision. But then it becomes a monumental task to get them to take the actions necessary to make the whole thing a success.

It gets even more curious because this is a monthly business-to-business subscription service. People sign up, pay, don’t do the things necessary to set it up properly, and then keep paying anyway. This doesn’t apply to everyone who signs up, but it applies to a meaningful majority, and my client hasn’t quite found a solution yet.

This got me wondering: what is the motivation behind someone’s consciously making a purchase, then not taking the actions necessary to make that purchase work? And why would someone continue paying for something they aren’t using, given there’s a material financial cost to that inertia?

I started looking for examples from my own life, or from people I know, that might demonstrate the same behaviour. And of course, I found one.

The unused gym membership

While this example doesn’t apply to me right now, it certainly did for most of my life. I can think of so many times over the years when I woke up one fine morning motivated to get fitter, did the online research, made the in-person visits, took the free trials, and did everything that comes with being sure that this is the place that will finally take me to the next level.

And then I........

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