To get a sense of the gravity of the situation, I'd like you to consider for a moment this cabin:
It's lovely, right? The setting is nice. The trees are beautiful. You can almost smell the mountain pines and fresh, natural air. But let's take a closer look:
The cabin is old. Decrepit. Empty. There's a broken bed in the dark, dank interior. The screen door hangs limply. The windows are crusted over. The family that once inhabited is long since gone. Probably dead. No one knows who this R.D. Skidmore was, just as no one will likely know you once you are 50 years past your shuffling off this mortal coil. Life is short. Life is not fair. Life, in a word, is pain.
Now that you're in the mood and you have a sense of the gravity of the situation, allow me to describe the context of the decision that I'm facing before asking for the much-needed advice:
Let's say you are an incredibly superstitious sports fan, and today your team played one of the more storied programs in all of college football (top 15 all time according to the worldwide leader). Let's say that the game was pretty rocky to start and frankly not looking great, so at halftime you decided to go do other things like read scriptures with your wife to get your mind off it. And then you came back into the room only to realize that the game had already begun again, and that while you were gone, your team intercepted the opposing team's quarterback and subsequently had scored a touchdown. Encouraged with the newfound momentum, you sat down and settled in to watch. And immediately the other team started to play really well. And your team started to not look so great. A kernel of an idea started to form, so you decide, tentatively, that maybe you need to leave again. Just to see what happens. And so you leave fore a while, but the game is a siren song that can't be ignored so you come back. And the minute you came back, you watched the opposing team's running back run for like 30 yards. So you leave again.
And you yo-yo like this for the rest of the game. And every time you were out of the room your team did great things. And also every time you came back into the room you saw the opponent's team do things that were, for their purposes, great, but that for your purposes were decidedly not great. And so you decide to leave for good. But you're still following the stats on your phone because somehow that doesn't seem to affect anything. And then as the game was coming to an end and when the opposing team had a 99.9% chance of winning and when you were out of the room, you started to feel pretty good about things. Because the team was going to lose, but you weren't there to see it happen, so it clearly wasn't your fault but rather some other cosmic force was at play here. And you start to relax.
BUT THEN, with just seconds to play, your team did some borderline miraculous thing and they scored, and by doing so forced overtime.
So you stayed out of the room. And while you were out of the room, your team scored a touchdown in overtime to take the lead in the game for the first time. At this point you had been doing some pretty heavy reasoning with yourself, and you had concluded with much adamance that you know with every logical fiber of your being that your presence before the television set can have no impact on individuals' -- strangers, really -- abilities to play a game 2500 miles away. So you came back in to watch the end of the game and to see your team win and relish in the accompanying joy. And then nearly immediately after you came back in, the opposing team scored a touchdown to force a second overtime.
Mildly shellshocked, you became aware that you had to go to the bathroom, so you went away again. And you lingered away because you still had your phone and the live stats. And as you lingered, your team won the game in the 2nd overtime.
Naturally you were overjoyed at your team winning, but there frankly wasn't as much overjoy as there would have been had you watched it.
Now, any being with any ounce of reasonability would attest to the fact that your actions, specifically with regard to your viewing habits and your general presence in front of the television set, directly affected the outcome of this game.
D.I.R.E.C.T.L.Y.
Thinking ahead to next week, and the weeks beyond, you are left with a very large concern. There seems to be a new rule coming into effect after some 33 years of fandom. You watch; your team loses. You avoid watching; your team wins. Simple.
The world would have you think that winning=happiness and losing=misery. So, logically, under this new rule, not watching=happiness.
But it's more complicated than that: While you acknowledge that sports and such have no real eternal significance, you also know that the action of *watching* your team play, win or lose, brings very real enjoyment to your life. The watching itself makes you feel kinda like this:
Certainly winning is better. And when you win really big ones, and you get to watch, you might feel a little something like this:
But when you don't watch, even though winning is nice and helps a fair bit, when the dust settles, win or lose, you feel more like this:
That said, you know that the world doesn't center around you. You know firsthand that other people also are brought very real enjoyment by watching your team play and very realer enjoyment by watching them win.
And so we arrive to the part where I ask your advice and you give it to me. If you were in such a situation, what would you do? Would you sacrifice your own pleasure for the greater good? I mean, if you could guarantee -- GUARANTEE -- that your team would win by the mere act of not watching them actually do it, would you? There is still joy in the win. Sure. But because you know the sheer and utter enjoyment of both watching AND winning, the joy of watchless winning is quite and considerably less. And isn't the fact that you know that you are not actually experiencing the full allotment of joy available it's own class of misery? Would you willingly increase the misery of your own life, knowing you've created greater joy for others?
It might be easy for you, dear reader, sitting outside and above the situation to say, "Well, my dear Sam, certainly it is incumbent upon you to do all you can to provide for the well-being of your neighbor." I get that that's the right answer. Logically. But, as the paterfamilias has taught us, it's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart. Put yourself in my shoes here. What would you do?
