I’ve been a sports fan for my whole life. I love all of it. Darts? Lawnmower racing? Luge? Bring it. Badminton? Le Mans? UFC? Sailing? Yup. I’m not super picky but I want it to be good quality. Show me skills and a great performance, show me emotion, just show me the actual thing and not NBC Olympics’ smarmy fucking backstories.
A couple of years back when I read about Ryan Reynolds investing in a Welsh football club - Wrexham AFC - well down the ranks of the English football pyramid I jumped on board. I’m a good Canadian and a fan of his snarky brand of humour so it seemed like a fit. Things got progressively more involved as the documentary dropped on Hulu and I got caught up in the team’s successes and failures. Suffice it to say that I could barely watch the last few matches of this season as they teetered on the edge of winning the league and gaining promotion up the pyramid.
I think the last time I got so emotionally caught up in a team was with the Mavericks when we were still living in the Dallas area. ABC’s Wild World of Sports was right when they talked about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat: we allow sports to project those feelings onto us.
Stadia and Gladiators
Large events - executions, concerts, races, tractor pulls, fights, team sports - have drawn in humanity for thousands of years. From Greek stadia for the Olympics to Metallica filling arenas they bring together spectacle, excitement, skilled solo or team performances, voices raised in unison, and mob-like emotions shared in community. From a dopamine perspective these events are their own version of heroin: it’s not a surprise that humanity flocks to them. Even without providing us an evolutionary advantage they have become culturally significant.
As much as humanity revels in the pleasure of song, the thrill of amazing physical feats, we also find ourselves unable to look away from the crashes at the racetrack or the bloodied fighter being pummeled in the ring. The Romans often used gladiatorial fights in giant arenas to keep the poor unemployed and occupied, distracting them from the problems of the day. The crowds would boo the lack of action, chant their bloodlust, or cheer to save the life of a gladiator.
Online FUD
From Facebook to Twitter to Telegram, our consumption of media and news happens in infinite, online arenas. Today’s stadia may be virtual but the amount of bloodlust, cheering, and distraction of the populace remains the same. Governments use it to foment unrest in their enemy’s citizenry or to distract their own citizens. Lobbyists and conspiracists use it to make people fear immigrants, and question the science behind climate change and vaccines. Bias, misinformation, and disinformation are constant. The online arena has become weaponized FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).
We no longer need to buy tickets and queue up at the stadium with the other plebs - everything is viewable online immediately. This is a worst-case scenario for our brains chasing the next dopamine hit. The crowds have been replaced by the comment section, the cheering, booing, and singing has morphed into the back and forth of opinions, slights, morality policing, and trolling. We’ve transitioned from “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” to “The thrill of schadenfreude and the fear of ‘them’”.
We see it play out almost daily. In every case we see a full range of opinions, from compassion to the odd glee of the looky-loos. Recent examples include:
10’s of thousands of Youtube viewers watching storm-chasers hunt down tornados - and their subsequent carnage - in the midwest
millions of people on all channels watching and commenting on a coup attempt in Russia
seemingly half of humanity waiting for news about a missing tourist submarine
an almost constant stream of “abusive and racist woman caught on camera reports” that turns into them losing their jobs because they exposed their hate to the internet mob
In 1985 Stephen King published The Running Man (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman … the book is wayyyyy better than the movie with Arnold), the story of a hard luck protagonist who enters a reality TV show in which he desperately tries to outrun a team of hunters who are guided by tips from the public. Watching combat video of Russian troops being killed in Ukraine - and the subsequent cheering on social media - shows how close we are to this as reality.
Thriving
What does this mean for us as we wish to thrive later in our lives? ‘Thriving’ in this case means how we ration our attention. The attention economy is wielded by some powerful forces: big business, governments, cultural movements, and so on. Unlike the days where an industry magnate could buy a large newspaper and bias the news that was printed, now these groups are able to execute large-scale bias or propaganda campaigns using online bots to amplify small voices and make them appear to be wider cultural movements. Magnates that own social media outlets no longer fully control the presses.
To thrive, let’s point our attention at creating, human connection, and improving our lives and the lives of others. We can still love the emotion of sports, but we owe it to ourselves and our fellow citizens to not take part in the gawking mob, lest we become this century’s version of the plebs screaming for more blood in the gladiatorial arena.