I literally did both? I still hold records at my school but also would spend all of my free time at home in a computer. Sports by itself is not going to change what you do in your free time at home
Same, but I was pretty bad at the sports part. Still spent a lot of time playing for the lower teams though. I enjoyed both in the end.
The point is I could’ve been a normal person
You can change things you dont like about your life as an adult. Not everything of course we still have to pay rent and eat and shit (on the landlords doorstep). But if you were a weird teenager you dont have to be a weird adult. You can go to the gym and therapy and get a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a gundam.
The world is your oyster. Get a girlfriend, a boyfriend, AND a gundam.
I dont know why I would limit myself like that, youre right
Get the oyster as well then.
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i dont think thats necessarily true, i did sports growing up as a kid and was very uncoordinated despite playing competitive sports year round until i was about 16, which is basically when you age out of a lot of youth sports if you’re not good enough to carry on into competitive jr and adult leagues. So that being said my gains are also only for the swoletariat.
+1 for gundam
I hate to break it to you but sports was never gonna do that
I imagine having mainstream hobbies and interests would make me fit in more even if it’s just an illusion.
“Normal” = liberal = evil
Considering that I’m abnormal, depressed, lazy, alone, and hate everything and everyone, I don’t see how I’m any less evil.
Liberals are genocidal colonialists and you are not.
Yeah but I honestly don’t care about any of that beyond the abstract because I’ve gone through life without experiencing basic, normal milestones a person should.
gone through life without experiencing basic, normal milestones a person should.
Almost all queer and neurodiverse people can relate
Kill the you in your head that desires to be “normal”!
Sports parents can be pretty abusive in how they make young children devote hours of their life to a sport that their parent has decided they should do.
My own parents were strict about my technology usage and I got my consoles taken away from me if I spent too much time on them. Most of my free time was spent reading, watching movies, and playing with action figures.
Sports parents can be pretty abusive in how they make young children devote hours of their life to a sport that their parent has decided they should do.
Yea, but introducing kids to sports ata young age also get them good at it. Wish my parents actually encouraged and forced me to do it, because I actually loved sports.
encouraged and forced me to do it
These are two different words you cant put an and between them like they mean the same thing. There’s a huge difference between providing sports as an option and “forcing” a kid.
Like if you had been forced the chances the end result would have been you loving them would have been slim.
I guess I should clarify my use of the word forced. I do think some semblance of discipline needs to be instilled in people and it’s not 100% an intrinsic quality in a person or something that’s entirely a result of passion
You can only do so much. I was taking guitar lessons at age 4, and loving them, until my mom (who was also taking lessons with the same teacher) got frustrated, broke her guitar on the sidewalk and never took me back for music lessons.
Could I have ended up with a skill I kept as an adult, maybe? Speculating on what could have been isn’t too productive at this point.
Could I have ended up with a skill I kept as an adult, maybe? Speculating on what could have been isn’t too productive at this point.
What if you ended up playing Dave Mathews songs on the campus quad? She actually saved you!
Lol my girlfriend is still dealing with the trauma, mental and physical, of being forced to play football don’t romanticize that.
ETA: Also as an uncordinated autistic kid anytime I was “force to play sports” my teammate would put me through some of the worst bullying and ostracization I ever experienced. You dont actually want this.
I would think OP is talking more about playing in people’s backyards for fun, not the proto fascist hellscape of school sports
Thats certainly not the first thing I think of when I hear the team “forced into sports”. That term definitely evokes being forced into little league or whatever. and RyanGosling hasn’t really clarified elsewise.
I played in my backyard pretty much on my own as a kid. But I was doing like, imagination games, not really “sports”. Like tech wasnt as ubiquitous then and I definitly stopped doing that after like, middle school. But I think there’s a difference between “I wish my screentime had been limited” and "I wish i had been forced into sports rhetorically.
hell i was decent at it and it didn’t stop the bullying and attempted murder
Me too. The bullying came from other kids, others’ parents, and the teachers! It’s taken me decades to dip my toes back into sports and realise they’re actually enjoyable in the right contexts.
I was forced to play sports and hated it
I was forced to play sports and got some injuries that did lasting damage, all to placate a chud family.
Would not recommend forcing kids to play sports, particularly ones with expected contact injuries.
The arts should be a fine alternative.
no injuries but my parents used to make me go out and throw baseballs at me
they thought the computer was useless. i was writing code at like 12 and would have to delete it because it was “breaking the computer”
i was too big and masc bodied to be allowed to do that. jokes on them i hated all things IT related when i tried to go to college for it
Yep, same here. If anything it made me less likely to pursue physically active hobbies as an adult.
Was also forced into it (baseball, such a boring sport only topped by golf) and didn’t like it, however I got into playing ice hockey as an adult and I wished so much that I had started playing as a kid cause it’s so fucking fun.
E: not trying to advocate for forcing kids into a sport here, more what I was going for was that getting into a sport of your own volition as an adult is way better for being engaged (fuck I would have loved to compete in hockey though)
i am proud to have been raised as a poster, personally
Dad would often wake me and my little brother up at 5:15 am, still drunk from the night before, to go to posting practice. I was 7 years old and shivering because we lived in North Dakota and my dad hated keeping the heat on at night. My routine was to stand on top of the central air vents, after he would mercifully turn the heat back on, in my long johns while eating a heaping bowl of Frosted Flakes.
At 5:40 am he would direct me to the basement where our computers were located. I say computers but it was more like a server farm. We were posters. My dad had dreams of us going pro so he made sure we had the best equipment and he bribed the local Poster Association to get us in to Triple A Posting League. After a short warm up we would begin our serious posting at 6 am. Obviously we would check Something Awful for the latest news from the posting trenches but my favorite place to go ham was the news message boards. I’d be posting about how good Dick Cheney’s shot is one second and quickly pivot to how lame Al Gore was for believing in things.
But this was my downfall. This is why I was never destined for the pros. My beliefs weren’t sincere. I was nothing more than a troll. I was never able to capture the sickness of the world in a pithy and cynical yet humorous quip. That’s what separates the pros from the amateurs in Posting.
We should wean kids off Twitter by having them partake in a collective bulletin poster’s club
I was thinking recently that I wish I had been forced to join a sports team. If only to feel what it’s like to be part of a whole, to have people support me and to support them in return
Nah those teams are like extreme bullying pens. The wholesome chungus 100 disney-netflix-pixar representation of kids coming together to support each other is a total fucking fantasy. Kids especially teens are very mean.
Its not like its impossible to predict either. You’re putting a kid who isnt athletic on a team with athletic kids, and those athletic kids see the unathletic kid dragging the team down. What the fuck do you think is going to happen? Oh they’re just going to be real sweet about it? No they’re going to bully you ruthlessly for being the weak point on the team. Happened to me.
You mean Haikyuu lied to me!!! Impossible
I think about this pretty often. I’ve lost most of my interest in video games, but that’s pretty much all I did until my mid-20s. The grass is always greener, but I think I’d be a much more interesting and satisfied person if I had grew up becoming very involved in literature, music, art, sports, or even film tbh as long as it was going beyond “watches a lot of movies”. I’m pivoting now, but it’s a lot harder to do with a full-time job and family that competes for my time.
Never believe you are too old to gain physical literacy and enjoy a sport. Rock climbing and BJJ were made for your demographic.
I don’t know. The problem now is that I despise sports, both watching and playing, and feel out of place around everyone else involved in it
There’s no way being forced to do something against your will would have changed this. I find it extremly strange that you’re saying you wished your parents forced you into a socially normal box you probably were never actually suited for. My parents tried to sports me a bit, not too hard. But it never worked. So they stopped.
I played a fair amount of sports and don’t have that sports watching fever.
I don’t think you can make yourself like something just by being introduced to it earlier or your parents forcing you to do a particular thing.
Assuming you’re an American, how about pick a sport that doesn’t have a following there. Then you can be both an oddball and a sports guy, and it’ll elevate you above chud level. Can offer a suggestion
The thing to know about watching sports is that it is usually boring as fuck unless you:
- develop something like a parasocial relationship with some of the players
- watch it with other people who are into that sport, so it becomes an opportunity to bond socially
If you don’t know anything about the actual people playing then all the non-highlight moments (95% of the runtime) is just boring. It gets interesting if you learn the stories about a few of the players, so you can place that particular contest within the context of their career and know what it means for them. This gives rise to interesting questions that you would like to see answered. How does this person’s style match up against the defense levied against them? How will they deal or interact with a notable person on the opposing side? In this way, sports becomes basically a “who would win, batman or superman?” type debate except you actually get to see it play out & answered in real life.
If you want to intellectualize sports within the context of leftist politics, all existing socialist nations greatly prize(d) achievement in sports; sports are also very popular among the working classes of all countries. So, if you despise sports you are definitely out of touch with proletarian culture. The Chomskyite “sports are the opium of the masses” line is nerd shit that needs to be ruthlessly mocked and should have no place in mass politics. It is basically very fucking reddit. Sorry.
However despite all that I find most sports boring and am only into one in particular (MMA) that is related to a sport I do (BJJ). So that is a good entrypoint. Your physical health is important so exercise is important. However, most exercise for the sake of exercise is boring. So do a sport. As I said, BJJ and rock climbing are both very popular with hitherto-unathletic people.
Eh, I grew up with screen time limits and I mostly just read and autisticly paced around the back yard while imagining stuff. When I was really little, occasionally my parents would take me to camps / day programs at the YMCA where we did sports stuff, and I even was briefly on a soccer team as a little kid, but I was never really interested in sports and my parents never forced it; they introduced me to sports but never forced me into it, and when I never showed interest in doing more sports stuff they left it at that. My guess is that if you never got into sports on your own, then you wouldn’t have even if your parents limited your screen time, and if your parents actually forced you into it you’d probably hate sports even more lol
I hate the sports I was forced toplay, and love the other ones
I didn’t enjoy sports, but I’ve really come to enjoy climbing and running as I’ve got older. It’s the competitive nature I never liked. I’m a bad loser.
And it just keeps getting worse, honestly. I’m a pretty online person, but even I have come to the realization that Apple giving you the option to track your screen time or whatever horse shit they do isn’t a solution and there are times where force is necessary, especially when you’re messing with how the brain processes a reward.
Just another plague where the only solution is pErSoNaL rEsPonSIBiLity and not forced accountability for those who lobbied the feds to make this shit a reality
Having to go to work is unrionically healthy for my rotted brain
I go to work and am on the computer for 8+ hours
It really makes me hate hate hate technology
Oh yeah damn. My job for the last while was screen free so it felt pretty refreshing sometimes
Having to go to work is unrionically healthy for my rotted brain
Books served me quite well before computers came along. War, sports and religion are the three most wasteful inventions of humanity in terms of time, money and human life. And they are all linked as part of the “us verses them” tribalistic mentality.
As someone who isn’t much into sports, you absolutely cannot write it off as a waste of time money and human life, any more than anything else.
As well as being a pursuit many people love and have a good time with, most local sports are about building a local community, so you socialise and make friends, which is one of the healthiest and funnest things you can do in this world.
And if nothing else at all, sports are typically a moderate-intensive exercise, meaning for someone otherwise sedentary, spending an hour playing football might give a return on lifetime by 2-4 hours, as well as improving mood, function, health, etc etc benefits of exercise.
War sure, religion maybe, but sports? The mega team franchise stuff that taps into tribalistic tendencies is weird but I would say thats not intrinsic to sport, it’s a capitalist development. I think at basically any level below that theres a lot of value to be had from sports. Also I think that’s not all that present in sports that feature individual competition e.g. tennis, fencing…
One might make a similar argument for religion actually. There’s stuff that’s been really useful to humans in religion even today, it’s primarily bad at higher level of organization.
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Have you actually interacted with those people? They know nothing about homestuck lore nor who is Sargon the youtuber
Don’t make me get out the Homestuck chart
No you don’t, being forced into it will simply make you resent it, and avoid it habitually the moment you have an inch of freedom
Seconded, I was forced outside all the time as a kid and while I like certain grasstouching things, I am kind of perpetually inside now. Thanks mom!
We need to make gaming socially stigmatized again. This antisocial slop going mainstream is responsible for the spread of so much reactionary bullshit everywhere jn the world. The CPC should’ve never ended the console bans they should’ve gone a step further and drone strike gabe newell.
It’s not too late. Just stop paying your internet bill for a couple months and it’ll wean you off video games and other slop.
Does this website seriously believe that jock culture is any less toxically masculine than gamer culture or? Have we gone so far the other direction where we started realizing that nerd culture is actually just as toxicly masculine as sports bro culture, which was a good thing, but now we actually think that its only the nerds that are?
Like if this thread was about encouraging kids to disengage from screens to read or do artistic things or even do physical things on their own or with accepting friends I’d be down but team sports are fucking toxic as hell man. Unless your kid is like, actually jock-coded and can fit in they’re probably going to have a bad time. And even then like, do you really want to socialize them into that culture? I question that.
ETA: I’m also put off by the art elitism in this but thats another subject.
ETA2: Actually no ok I do want to talk about that a bit. Can we like, talk about how a good parent could engage with their kid about the games they play as like… an artform? (And lso steer them away from the sloppy stuff to stuff thats actually like… good. Which like, I realize is hard for a parent to do especially if they dont know about games in their own right, like whats going on with my sister and my nephew, but its not impossible. And I dont think like, banning a form of art is really the way to solve the issue lmao.
But i absolutely of course in favor of screen time limitations. I see an increasing amount of child liberation discourse that seems to genuinly believe that you can just let 5 year olds do whatever they fuck they want and they’ll end up fine, up to and including things like not enforcing a bed time, and that shit is dumb like. I do think child liberation is good in some amounts but theres obviously like… parents do need to enforce certain rules and standards on kids especially with so much brain poison out there.
But I think there’s a midpoint here between “let the kids entire freetime be Fornite and Minecraft” and “just dont let the kid play games literally at all”.
Does this website seriously believe that jock culture is any less toxically masculine than gamer culture or?
No
People are mostly just identifying with the other half of the OP, resenting technology and our addictions to it.
I think OP said a bit more than that. As did oregoncom. OP said he wished he was forced into sports which I can tell you is misguided on so many levels. oregoncom said we should just straight up ban video games as if games cant be a healthy part of your life or an artistic experiance, implying theyre all slop. Which is just art snobbery.
Theres a lot more going on then just “I wish I wasnt addicted to computers”. If it was just that, I might agree. Though frankyl I dont reeally regret myself just existing day to day because Im disabled and capitalism doesnt really have a place for someone who functions how I do so Im just gonna keep drifting. I wish I could find time to like, read more, or learn to draw, sure. (Hell I actually wish I could find time to acutally PLAY games rather than waste time on youtube/twitch/discord. Even that would feel more productive). But I think alienation has hit me so hard that I dont really care that much anymore.
yeah, there is a lot going on for sure, everyone is bringing their own preconceived notions and hangups to it. I only really replied because 1) the comment you replied to said nothing about sports or physical activity, let alone mounting a defense of “jock culture”, so I felt it merited a reply, and 2) I felt like most people in the thread weren’t actually agreeing with “we should force kids to join sports teams” and were just going on vibes. Some are, but not everyone
idk how I feel about it. technology kinda sucks ass but you’re not wrong, there’s plenty of valuable uses for it and tons of artistic value to digital mediums.
I wish sports were less notoriously stupid, injurious, bro-y affairs when I was in school. I needed that physical activity, but everyone involved in promoting it and half the other kids who really liked sports were like the worst humans I’d ever interacted with. I don’t think that’s inherent or at all universal, but it was my experience.
edit: and yeah, mood, I’m terminally online like real bad these days, just playing through disco elysium would feel productive compared to this shit
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Jocks arent an opressed group lol please calm down. Yes athletes have other hobbies and are whole humans. Im talking about cultural issues not individuals. A lot of these issues come from parents and coaches anyway.
And futhermore I’m not talking about professional athletes im talking about sports for kids. I lived in predominatly white areas so the kids who picked on me for sucking at sports were all white and my latent dislike of people that remind me too much of my bullies due to my trauma is directed based on that (ie like, a black pro athlete has never triggered that once in my life lol). I actually have similar feelings about letting go of bitterness towards bullies for various reasons i wont get into. But i learned the hard way when i tried to impose that on others that telling people how to deal with their trauma is not right and they dont have to forgive if they dont want to.
Team sports are demonstrably a bad idea for an uncordinated autistic kid like me. I become a load to the team and it doesnt work for anyone. The other kids hate me for dragging then down. Put those kids in something individual like martial arts, gymnastics, dance, even track would work.
And idk the fact that team sports for kids (and college sports to an extent too) have serious cultural issues is well documented i dont think i should even have to explain like its demonstrably true and theres mountains of evidence.
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Jocks weren’t even my main issue in school really. Team sports themselves were bullying central but like. In highschool a lot of the football kids were nice to me. Not all my bullies were athletic. My experiance with bullying defied the stereotypes shown in movies in many ways!
This isnt about that. its about the well documented problems with athletic programs for kids that exist right now. Is my experience universal? No, because not every kid is an uncoordinated autistic kid with negative athletic ability lol. But it is pretty fucking common and other people in this thread have talked about it.
Those need to be fixed. The fix isnt abolishing sports programs obviously. But there does need to be cultural change. Because until there is theres going to be a lot of disabled kids going through traumatic experiences.
Like idk I dont get your reaction here like do you think my solution is to abolish sports? The only ones I’d even consider that for are golf for environmental reasons and even then I’m fine with driving ranges and mini golf. Others have said abolish american football (gridiron) but I’m not even sure i’n behind that. Though there are serious reforms that have to be made for contact sports so kids because of concussions and shit. But sports that aren’t even high contact like basketball and soccer? Totally fine with me lol. I’m not trying to abolish them. I’m trying to make reforms to the culture surrounding them. Toxic sports parents, shitty abusive coaches, the bullying culture, the way many schools are biased towards athletes, ect ect ect.
