I think part of the difficulty of imagining sports as a defining feature of peoples’ lives is the profound inequality in the sports world. The number of professional sports players is extremely low and will decrease relative to the athlete population over time. Imagine the inscription then, on the tombstone of one of these athletes. Not “He strove for greatness”. Not “SOCHI 2014 BRONZE” or anything of that sort. How pathetic would it be for your highest achievement in life being that you kicked a ball around adequately? Who here can honestly imagine themselves satisfied with such an empty existence? And if you can’t, then in my opinion the idea of sports as a solution to the deaths of despair problem is at best seriously flawed.
How pathetic would it be for your highest achievement in life being that you kicked a ball around adequately? Who here can honestly imagine themselves satisfied with such an empty existence?
Is it less pathetic to be an average software developer? Because if tomorrow a car hit me, they might put this on my tombstone, and I would have no right to object.
“Had a lot of fun; didn’t visibly contribute to the larger picture”—I think that for many people this would be an improvement over what they have currently.
How pathetic would it be for your highest achievement in life being that you kicked a ball around adequately? Who here can honestly imagine themselves satisfied with such an empty existence?
Is it less pathetic to be an average software developer?
If you eliminate all the software developers that are working on things that are not just useless but actually bad, and take the average of those who remain, then… yeah, it is way less pathetic to be one of those “average of the non-evil” software developers than it is to be an adequate ball-kicker.
The difference is that (ideally) a software developer makes the world a better place to live in (again, ideally). So would a welder, or a doctor, or anyone else working a useful job. Secondly, I had a point about why this doesn’t seem like a realistic solution to this problem: If you can’t put yourself directly in the shoes of the person you’re trying to help, then you may need to reexamine your solution and find out why.
I think part of the difficulty of imagining sports as a defining feature of peoples’ lives is the profound inequality in the sports world. The number of professional sports players is extremely low and will decrease relative to the athlete population over time. Imagine the inscription then, on the tombstone of one of these athletes. Not “He strove for greatness”. Not “SOCHI 2014 BRONZE” or anything of that sort. How pathetic would it be for your highest achievement in life being that you kicked a ball around adequately? Who here can honestly imagine themselves satisfied with such an empty existence? And if you can’t, then in my opinion the idea of sports as a solution to the deaths of despair problem is at best seriously flawed.
Is it less pathetic to be an average software developer? Because if tomorrow a car hit me, they might put this on my tombstone, and I would have no right to object.
“Had a lot of fun; didn’t visibly contribute to the larger picture”—I think that for many people this would be an improvement over what they have currently.
This is severely confounded by the fact thay many software developers are doing things that are actively detrimental, like working on adtech, or developing new social control features for social media, or helping totalitarian governments oppress dissidents, etc.
If you eliminate all the software developers that are working on things that are not just useless but actually bad, and take the average of those who remain, then… yeah, it is way less pathetic to be one of those “average of the non-evil” software developers than it is to be an adequate ball-kicker.
The difference is that (ideally) a software developer makes the world a better place to live in (again, ideally). So would a welder, or a doctor, or anyone else working a useful job. Secondly, I had a point about why this doesn’t seem like a realistic solution to this problem: If you can’t put yourself directly in the shoes of the person you’re trying to help, then you may need to reexamine your solution and find out why.
I hope at least the sports fans have better things to do than define themselves in the tombstone-writing terms. Which other people will write.