NFL analyst Tony Dungy tweeted a dumb joke last week. You might even call it a “dad joke” (Dungy is father to ten). In response to a Minnesota high school’s plan to put tampons in the boys bathroom, Dungy quipped that other schools were supplying litter boxes for students who identify as cats.

Almost half a century later, Peter Finch’s “I’m mad as hell” speech from 1976’s Network still stirs the blood. But can we admit it’s a little outdated? The anger that Finch’s Howard Beale urges us to wield against the media has been coopted: getting us mad is now part of the business plan. We can find a more pertinent diagnosis of our current situation in a movie released just five years after Sidney Lumet’s beloved classic: My Dinner with Andre.

Anyone who felt genuinely discouraged by a certain fitness chain’s recent “We Don’t Speak January” marketing gimmick probably doesn’t belong in a gym anyway. At least not yet. It feels good to buy a gym membership. It feels decisive. But big, symbolic gestures are not where you’ll get your gains. You have to make exercise a habit, something you can do without thinking too much. This is why it needs to be specific and actionable. We don’t “practice good dental hygiene” before bed; we just brush our teeth. So it is with “getting in shape.” Building a routine takes time, so it’s got to be easy enough that you can do it every day, with enough of a reward that it generally seems worth the effort, if only in retrospect.