Why Do Millions Cheer for Games They Never Play?
I never could get "into" sports watching. I've always been the type to play it rather than watch others enjoy something. Guess because it had something to do with not growing up with a telly either. I was an outside type of kid. Whether it was soccer, football, boxing, etc, it didn't really matter. I wanted to do it myself instead and not in a competitive way either. Just for funs. Hence why I never joined a school team either. It took all the joy out of it for me when it gets turned into a chore or a job.
But yet when I observed the adults watch their favorite games, usually soccer in my case, I thought it weird how these guys while sitting on the couch eating potato chips and sipping beer got so emotional over a game they never had no real influence in.
Now of course, in today's time, I am perplexed how and why people get so emotionally invested in games they never actually play. Maybe it's because they don't get to be a child again sometimes as often as they used to? Or maybe it's because of some brainwashing going on to keep us distracted from life's truest gifts. I don't know yet. But we can try figure out what that connection is.
Then it dawned on me one day, a long time ago, I think about over 15+ years ago, I'm 35 now, I thought, maybe these mainstream sports corporations are the ones to benefit from all those people saying "We won" despite never laying a hand in the game itself. Surely it's not the only reason, because it's also a gambling opportunity for the gambler. But they only account for so much of the revenue while meantime, the fans of xyz sport are where the true money lays. They become so attached emotionally and spiritually that they end up buying merchandise after merchandise, ticket after ticket, to watch a game they could play with their own family and/or friends back home for free and still have just as much fun and dopamine hit doing it. Probably even more enjoyable if they gave it a chance.
I find it hilarious though how people would jump out of their seats and chant for their team just as equally hilarious as when people smash their TV because the quarterback throws the ball directly to the opposing team like in the last Super Bowl game that recently occurred. Or people fighting in the parking lot like wild baboons just for wearing the wrong outfit in the wrong place. These people take the game so serious they literally wear their teams like their gang members gangbanging for their team and turf. It's wild as fuck.
So then, like why? Why does this happen? Why do people do this? Why is sports watching so addicting? Is it tribalism? A method of trying to belong to something because they have something to fill in their soul and heart? Do you think that maybe they would be more fulfilling their space if they did it themselves? Is it lack of confidence? Is it because they have no one to play with? Too unhealthy because of all the Cheetos from binge watching sports on tv for many years? What's behind the psychology of all this?
And yet here I am, sitting back and watching it all unfold, thinking… maybe I’m the lucky one who gets to play instead of just cheer. Meanwhile, millions are yelling at screens, throwing chips at the couch, and paying for the privilege… and somehow calling it fun. So what does it all mean? Are we cheering for a team, or are we just cheering for a reason to belong? Maybe both. Maybe neither. Either way, it’s wild as hell to watch from the sidelines.
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Big talk coming from one who has 11kHP.
Fuck off my posts. I don't care about your opinions.
Yes. My understanding is informed by my interest in biology and the evolution of humanity. If you give careful thought to the conditions in which human species evolved, the social group was the critical resource that every individual was dependent on for their survival. People didn't have firearms, and lived in a world populated by megafauna that suffered predation from megafaunal predators, like lions, tigers, and bears. Hominids are a fraction of the size and weight of mammoths and ground sloths, so were easy pickings for predators of those megafauna. One guy with a pointy stick is hardly guaranteed to fend off a pack of wolves, hyenas, or smilodon. The evolutionary response was to turn humans into pack animals, to enable them to fend of packs of predators that would kill them individually without much danger to themselves.
During the Neolithic intraspecific competition, between human groups, became extremely intense as populations claimed the resources necessary to support them. Archaeologists have found cultures that appeared to have been preferentially cannibals, preying on farming or HG communities and eating them. Eventually these predatory cultures were exterminated - as we see, we are not cannibals today - but these cultures ended a lot of gene lines, and the ones that survived were those that best enabled vigilance and defense against human raiders. That put a premium on acculturation, on being completely devoted to your clan, community, great leader, and etc. Dissent and internal squabbling for freedom and power weakened your community, which rendered it vulnerable to attack and genocide from cannibals.
I see fanaticism of sports fans in light of this evolutionary pressure. I see partisan politics in the same light. Nationalism, ethnic racism, and etc. are all based on this biological imperative that has continually been existentially critical to our survival.
Consider the word 'fired'. It derives from Scotland, where the clans were the basis for society. When someone did something, or failed to do something requires, their community would banish them into the harsh Scottish environment (in which other clans were extremely unlikely to accept their immigration) and burn their home and all their possessions. That is where the word 'fire' came from as applied to employment today, and it was once a death sentence in the intense intraspecific competition for real estate and resources in Scotland at that time.
Human beings are social animals, and have been for the entirety of our duration on Earth. There is a tension between intelligence and conformity, between independence and absolute servitude, because great leaders can be utterly deranged (and today this is very apparent, not only in the psychopathy evident in the halls of power, but even in the oligarchy on Hive) seeking only to avail their every whim at any cost to the people they treat as their personal property. Sometimes societies need to revolt and create new leadership, and some individuals are so competent they not only can survive outside communities, but create new communities that out compete their neighbors and advance evolution in the traits that enable their superior competence, such as IQ.
My forecast is that decentralization of the means of production dramatically reduces the need for slaves, and the benefit of being enslaved, compared to the ability to cooperatively produce goods and services (particularly including security) in a relatively free society. IQ, not conformity, will increasingly enable the ambitious to secure their communities and families in free and prosperous felicity going forwards, and as the productive capacity potential to small communities and individuals increases, overlords' ability to centralize resources and attain to sybaritic wealth and power will decrease concomitantly.
Sybaritically wealthy overlords would rather kill us all than become our peers, particularly the psychopathic narcissists that only see us as means of attaining their whims, and there's a high concentration of psychopaths today in the halls of power. Tech advance favors intelligent and ambitious people by creating orders of magnitude improved productive capacity for them that merit that wealth by creating it. This strongly decreases the benefit to those more evolved to blindly conform and grovel before overlords, and it eliminates almost entirely the benefit to overlords of owning hordes of slaves, because automated production is vastly less expensive than hordes of slaves.
In the event small communities become able to extract the virtually infinite resources available off planet to create wealth, I cannot imagine the wealth and freedom that will make possible to humanity, particularly in the economic condition that the harsh environments in space creates that makes intraspecific competition far more expensive than cooperation.
Today these pressures are coming to a head, as psychopathic cannibals that have become overlords by enslaving hordes and extracting ever more wealth from them as tech advanced centralization are increasingly out competed by dissenting groups employing decentralized means of production the overlords do not parasitize, and the pleb masses evolved to grovel to masters are useless to both sides competing for wealth and power, incapable of independently creating wealth and power, and decrease the wealth and power of their masters during the critical competition with independent decentralized communities leveraging tech advance.
War comes, and will largely eradicate the obedient. If psychopathic overlords can slaughter the hordes of slaves while using them to slaughter their competition for wealth and power, this will produce the optimum result from their perspective. Folks intent on being free from masters will have to become secure from hordes of armed thugs, and modern automated weapons. I think this is more and more possible as tech advances, because it advances in every field of industry by decentralizing means of production of the most modern goods and services, which is an enormous advantage to distributed communities maximizing their productivity at the bleeding edge of automated production, particularly if they wisely focus on security.
Thanks!
With You! I never liked watching sports. I grew up without TV, too... Hmmmm.