A gym I didn’t visit for almost a year was one of many money leaks caused by unused subscriptions, and the reason behind them was a psychological one that couldn’t be caught on a spreadsheet.
I locked my bike outside the gym and just stood there for a moment, staring at the entrance and feeling almost as nervous as the first day I actually set foot in one.
It had been almost a year since I’d last walked through those doors, while still having paid €35 every single month that had quietly left my account in exchange for absolutely nothing. A number that had looked manageable until I started piling it all up and realized the total amount flushed down the drain was roughly €400, all of it while not even having lived in the city the gym was located.
My access card was still in my wallet, but I genuinely had no idea if it still worked. Maybe the gym had changed something in my absence, or maybe my subscription had been paused without me noticing. In the worst case someone would recognize me and ask where I’d been all that time, exactly the kind of polite and harmless question that feels the complete opposite when you’re the one being asked.
Fortunately, the gate near the reception opened. No alarm, no staff member looking up, nothing. Just the quiet sound of a door that had no idea who I was or how long I’d been gone. I exhaled, walked through, and tried to pretend that this walkthrough had been just like all the others before it.
But it wasn’t really the first time a gym entrance like this one had happened. This time was just the one with the longest stretch of absence of them all.
The Ridiculous Story I Told Myself
When I’d just finished my studies, I wasn’t allowed to live in my student house anymore. It had also become clear that I really needed to leave, because my new job had pulled me out of student life entirely. The rhythm of going to sleep and waking up whenever I wanted was no longer feasible, and that meant I had to move somewhere else. Since my then-girlfriend still had a couple of years to go in her studies, and I already knew that we’d eventually be looking for a new place in the same city to live together, I temporarily moved back in with my parents to accrue the necessary savings.
It was at this moment that some mastermind logic had started kicking in around the gym membership I was still having: If I cancelled the gym subscription now, even though I would temporarily move to another place, I’d lose my extremely favorable student discount rate for this premium gym. When I eventually moved back to the city, I’d have to resubscribe at the regular price, so by continuing to pay €35 a month I was technically saving money in the years to come.
Sounds like the kind of next-level math that even Einstein couldn’t have dreamed up, right? Well, here’s the true math that I failed to recognize at the time: Almost a year at €35 is close to €400. Four hundred euros to a gym I never visited, for a €10 to €15 discount I might use someday, on a membership I could have cancelled and resubscribed to at full price without coming out behind for at least two years. That’s €400 that could’ve gone to my savings buffer, to events I actually attended, or to anything else with a return greater than zero.
Normally I would say that as unfortunate as the event turned out to be, I at least learned from it. But over the course of my adult life I’ve held unused memberships at four different gyms that followed more or less the same trajectory.
In all cases would start off with a stretch of real dedication: several months of showing up, actually enjoying the work, eating sufficiently healthy, and ending up with a ‘hot girl fit’ body that would still struggle with something like swimming because everyone knows that doing cardio kills gains.
Then something would shift. Could’ve been a busy period at work or in my social life, a new personal fixation, or a different kind of moment where my focus drifted somewhere else entirely. The result? The gym visits would thin out, eventually become very rare, and then, for a number of months I’d rather not add up, I’d just keep paying.
If I’m truly honest, the amount I’ve spent on gym memberships I didn’t use across my entire adult life is probably well over two thousand euro. If you would also throw in other subscriptions like streaming services I forgot about and software platforms I stopped using, the total number would probably even start climbing in directions I’d rather not look.
Finding The Culprit
So why did I keep paying? The easy answer that friends and family have always assumed has been sheer laziness, and for a long time I thought the same. But that’s not really what was going on.
The honest version is that my attention spans are almost always all-or-nothing. When I’m really into something, I work in bursts of energy and intense hyperfocus, and during those bursts everything else tends to go quiet. It’s a mindset that’s actually helped me a lot in my life. It’s made me successfully land my first job, get promotions, got me in shape when needed, and built strong friendships through shared experiences that have already lasted multiple decades. When I really want to have or achieve something, the all-or-nothing mode switches on and good things frequently tend to follow.
But the flip side of that same wiring is less convenient. When my focus moves somewhere else, the previous thing doesn’t fade gradually but just… stops existing in my head altogether. It’s probably the most literal version of “out of sight, out of mind” possible. It isn’t a situation where I’m deliberately avoiding something because I’m feeling guilty about it, but one where my attention has simply moved on and the thing I was paying for simply dropped out of the part of my brain that noticed.
This is exactly why subscription services are such a brilliant business model to extract money from people like me. A small monthly amount, automatic, hidden in the noise of everything else leaving your account. Nothing forces you to think about it, and when you don’t naturally think about things that aren’t in front of you, you just… don’t.
Occasionally something external would pull it back into view. A bank statement, a reminder e-mail, a friend mentioning their own gym membership. In those moments I’d briefly realize I should probably cancel, but by then I was already so deep into whatever had replaced it that I’d let it slide a little longer.
The gym memberships weren’t uniquely expensive mistakes, but symptoms of a more general fact about how my mind actually operates. My attention is a strength when it’s aimed at something specific, but it’s also hemorrhaging money when aimed elsewhere.
Quitting The Gym and Paying Monthly
Although I’m still facing the occasional money leak challenge today, they’ve fortunately never been as severe as the gym-related ones anymore. I also haven’t set foot in a gym for ages, because I eventually learned that going to a gym doesn’t really help me in taking care of my physical health in a sustainable manner.
Instead, my physical activity lives at home. Bodyweight basics, kettlebells, a lot of walking. Is it optimal? Probably not. Would an elaborate gym with a more diverse range of equipment build me into something more impressive? Probably. But these things are always close by, so when a sudden burst of physical energy shows up I can immediately capitalize on it. There’s no gate to walk through, no card that might have stopped working, no staff member who might quietly notice that I’ve been gone for a while. The drift doesn’t cost me anything, because there’s nothing for it to quietly eat.
The subscription side gets the same treatment, for the exact same reason. Unless I’m already a heavy user, I pay monthly rather than yearly because the reminder hits more often and my attention has more chances to land on it. I already do a quick scroll through my banking app every now and then to see what’s happening to my accounts, and that way I can notice and stop the leaking before committing to a full year and potentially missing the renewal e-mail.
The real lesson from those four unpaid gym memberships wasn’t about the gyms at all. It was that my money leaks are actually downstream of how my mind naturally works, not how myself or others ideally would like it to. Fighting the drift wasn’t the answer, because the drift is just what’s unavoidably going on under the hood. But building a life where the drift doesn’t matter, and where there’s not too much to forget about while I’m focused somewhere else, turned out to be much more effective than any amount of promising myself I’d be more disciplined.
Plugging money leaks, it turns out, starts with understanding yourself. It’s harder and more confrontational than it sounds, but also a lot more interesting than staring at a spreadsheet.
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