Why Sport is the Opposite of Facebook

Few people look at children playing with phones and screens and watch the scene with unalloyed pleasure.  Parents regulate and restrict screen time in a way that they never do with outdoor play.  There is a tacit acceptance that, however successful screens are as opiates of childhood, they are unwholesome and subjects of suspicion.  Because they are so fundamentally passive and introspective, neither of which are conditions which are applauded.

Then there is social media.  It’s all about me.  It is based on the narcissistic assumption that the world shares the obsession of the individual that what she is doing at any given moment is of interest to the rest of the world.  What's for lunch? What I am watching on TV?  Everything about social media centres around the individual, and the delusion that this might be important to others.

Sport, on the other hand, is the opposite of this.  It is active and social.  It involves effort and collaboration.  Its rewards come as a result of application, not immediately at the touch of a button.  That is why team sports are so significant and important.  Unlike Facebook, they are not all about the individual.  The team goal is bigger than any single player.  It demands collaboration, selflessness and teamship. It relegates the individual to less important than the whole.  Working towards the team goal demands sacrifice, patience and a willingness to accept something as more important than self.  The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.

The history of humanity has been about collaboration.  About working together to achieve a common aim that no individual can reach alone.  And people have evolved to be social; to interact, to help each other and to share triumph. 

Team sports may be under pressure, both in schools and society.  Undemanding rival attractions may appear to be eclipsing a hundred years of the primacy of team games.  The cult of the individual may appear to have become more important. Constant updates of wholly irrelevant activities based on the mistaken belief that anyone cares.

Evolution doesn’t happen that quickly.  Man is still a collaborative and social animal, who survived by working together with others to achieve worthwhile groups aims.  This is his natural environment, which is why we are instinctively comfortable to seeing children playing outside together, but feel the need to restrict screen time.  Screens require little effort; the idea that everyone is interested in what we do may be attractive, but it is delusional. 

Doing nothing is not what humans evolved to do.  And that is why sport will always be more rewarding than Facebook - for the children that discover it