Wit & Attitude Quote by Joseph Epstein

Epstein turns the sanctimony of endurance culture into a climate joke: jogging, he implies, isn’t a clean path to virtue so much as a self-inflicted inconvenience with a punchline. The simile is deliberately overkill. A fur coat in Texas in August is not merely uncomfortable, it’s absurd - the kind of choice that invites questions about your judgment. By mapping running onto that image, Epstein sidesteps the usual fitness rhetoric (discipline, grit, optimization) and reframes it as theater: you do the thing largely to savor the moment you stop doing it.

The intent is not anti-exercise so much as anti-pretense. Epstein is puncturing the moral halo that can surround running, especially among the educated middle class for whom suffering can become a credential. The “true joy” isn’t the runner’s high or the meditative rhythm; it’s relief. That’s a sly inversion of the way runners narrate their own practice, where pain is recoded as progress. Epstein’s version insists pain is just pain, and the reward is escape.

Subtextually, it’s also about control. Modern life offers plenty of discomfort you can’t remove: deadlines, aging, anxiety. Voluntary hardship is attractive because it ends on your terms. You get to be the hero and the rescuer. The profanity (“the damn thing”) seals the stance: impatient, anti-pious, amused by the whole ritual. In context, it reads like a writer’s skepticism toward fads that package misery as meaning, reminding us that sometimes the most honest pleasure is simply taking the coat off.