game time

on connectedness, agency, and relinquishing control

Philips Koninck, The Feast of Bacchus, 1654 (inspired by this)

I never thought I’d say this: I love watching football, and unexpectedly, it’s been a gift for my writing practice.

A high-stakes competitive tournament like the World Cup or the Olympics has always been a draw for me. But not all sports are created equal. Soccer holds a special place in my heart: it’s the beautiful game, athleticism and teamwork elevated to an art form. I love the high-octane rhythm of basketball, and even baseball has its leisurely appeal at the ballpark. Football, on the other hand, was always inferior: brutish, chaotic, and unapologetically American.

For a long time, my only exposure to it was the Superbowl, and even then, it was just an excuse to hang out with friends, eat a year’s worth of nachos, and dissect the halftime show and commercials. But since September, I’ve been tuning into the regular season, watching at least a game a week.

I can no longer pretend that I’m not a fan.

And an unlikely one: my social world consists almost entirely of writers or creative tech people who have little interest in watching men in tights grunt and charge at each other. While an estimated one in two Americans watch the NFL, I can count on one hand the number of people I personally know who can tell you what a first down is. Learning the language of the game makes me feel connected to the greater part of the country that I normally don’t interact with. It’s a good feeling, particularly at a time when there’s so much to divide us, when it feels safer to retreat into our known communities.

I like that I can join the masses in catching a Sunday night game to beat the scaries. The ritual is mundane, but what makes it special is knowing I chose my way into it. Maybe as a first-gen immigrant, this nationwide connectedness that transcends boundaries feels particularly profound—a kind of belonging I wasn’t born into but can fully inhabit. I didn’t grow up watching football, so it’s not a feeling I take for granted.

Unlike prestige television where you can catch up on a season of Bridgerton or The Pitt at your own leisure, the immediacy of live sports forces people out of their siloes and into a shared space of consciousness for three hours. No one knows how this game is going to unfold, and we’re all going to find out at the same time. With so much content competing for our attention, it’s an increasingly rare experience.

It’s also invigorating watching people do hard things—whether that’s Olympic cross-country skiing or the Bills and Broncos battling through overtime. In those final fifty-five seconds, I could barely look at the screen. When the Bills lost by a field goal, I thought to myself, well, at least they only have themselves to blame. Five turnovers. So many fumbles.

It feels better to rationalize failure as a result of something we can control rather than something we have very little power to influence like a bad referee call. It’s a high agency mindset, and it’s served me well. But we can’t ignore the role of luck. You could be the best player, the best team—you could do everything to prepare—and still not win a Superbowl or an Olympic gold.

Annie Duke makes this point in her book Thinking in Bets. We often commit the fallacy of judging a decision based on the outcome without accounting for the role of luck and unforeseen events. A good decision could lead to a poor outcome. Conversely, a bad decision could result in a favorable outcome. Even fumbles involve luck: how the ball bounces, whether a defender is in the right spot, etc.

As a Type A person who likes to feel in control, I have to constantly remind myself of this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I got into watching football at a time when I was single-mindedly focused on revising and perfecting my novel. Watching a game is a mirror onto my own brand of anxiety. I might be freaking out when my team is up by seven with three minutes left, while the people in the stadium are already celebrating. My reaction to the game reveals to me my own capacity for handling uncertainty (not great). Watching football is exposure therapy for relinquishing control.

Paradoxically, it’s also made me more productive. I’m more motivated to get important work done when I have a game to look forward to at the end of a day. It gives structure to my day and prevents procrastination because the game starts at 1 p.m. or 3 p.m. or 8:15 p.m. sharp whether I’m done with my work or not. The rhythm of the game—four quarters, six timeouts, and a halftime—allows me to watch passively while catching up on emails, newsletters, and magazine reading. This is replenishing because so much of my day to day—working a high-pressure job, laboring over a novel, close-reading books to hone my craft—requires intense focus.

In a high-achievement society, we could all use a break from relentless self-optimization. Sometimes, I just want to scream at my TV and watch a guy catch a ball.