I resent growing up with technology. Wish I was forced into playing sports instead of being allowed to sit on the computer all day
I resent growing up with technology. Wish I was forced into playing sports instead of being allowed to sit on the computer all day
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Local and school sports events can foster socialization, cohesion, and investment (as in improvement) in communities. You can make the same argument for the church. Learn to work within a team is good for kids. I feel like sports taught me to cut people slack, coordinate with others, and generally just made it easier to get along with people different then me. All of these things are compatible with socialism. I'll agree that war is wasteful (excluding socialist revolutionary action), religion is complex, but sports have clear positive benefits.
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
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
Why?
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".
Your generalization of team sports and by association the athletes that participate in them is pretty offensive. I expect better from a comrade. You might be surprised how many athletes in primary, hs, and college level sports are interested in anime, video games, programming, art, music, and politics. Some people just like to play sports and are not a part of some toxic "bro" culture.
I think a lot of hate on sports is coded racism due to the high predominance of POC participating at a high level. You'll generally find any cohort of non-professional athletes to be reflective of the regional population. Some self-crit is necessary on the left here.
I was picked on as a kid. A lot. It made me very bitter and I held a sort of ill will towards those that seemed to fit in effortlessly. I came to see what I was feeling was toxic as an adult. Kids can be little shits. They will pick on the person that doesn't fit the mold of their circle. This is true in any social situation. Sport isn't unique here. You gotta listen to your kids. If they feel like an outcast then don't force them into a bad situation. Make sure they get some kind of physical outlet in other ways and foster their interests where healthy. However, some kids just like to play sports. They have that right.
I had more interest in tabletop games and hanging out at the local shop than I did in the other extracurricular activities I had to participate in. But playing cards or painting minis "isn't real," so I had to go through other bullshit for my college resume, which I didn't end up even needing because I went to a state school.
I could have gotten more money for college doing what I wanted over fucking boy scouts and basketball lmao (though I did learn a lot of useful stuff in scouts).
my parents were anti video game anti tv anti computer anti cellphone but definitely not pro sports. I honestly didn't mind that much at the time which is kinda wild but honestly now i think it was kinda good. I spend like 8-9 hours outside every day i dont work even now.
There are adult amateur sports leagues for most sports in most cities, if you really wanted someone could do the forcing now
I too was allowed to sit at the computer all day but I also did martial arts, football, archery, tennis, squash, swimming, reading, painting, drawing, piano, all of which i opted into doing except martial arts which i hated the entire time i did it. I am like the biggest computer nerd I know and still wanted to do other stuff. My dad would put restrictions on my PC and I'd just crack through them until he gave up.
Being forced to do things isn't fun but if you wanted to do these things why would anyone have needed to force you? I grew up a turbo computer nerd but i still wanted and was allowed to do other things.
I'm not familiar with this sentiment what happened with computers to cause you to feel this way?