Pre-enshittification.

…especially on leg days.

That was quite well-executed.

Let’s make it non-fiction and have the setting be an arid, inhospitable, howling wasteland.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac