People care about sports because the matches have some sort of stakes, far more than anything in the average person's life, even if those are utterly artificial and ultimately meaningless. Sports also provides a way for people in an increasingly atomized world to bond with one another, but the fact that it's around inane entertainment built around arbitrary goals is rather sad.
In our postmodern culture hollowed out of any reality, especially a real culture, we are told that meaning is self-created, which implies that a sports match can be just as meaningful as for instance experiencing a great story. Defending the idea that the latter is qualitatively better than the former is guaranteed to make you seem like a massive elitist, gatekeeper, or perhaps a LARPer, and while there is no doubt that there is a fair amount of shallow superiority emanating from those who enjoy reading (older) books, the fact remains that quality is grounded in conscious experience, of which sports has next to none of, whereas great books are filled with it.
The system leads to what Kaczynski called surrogate activities, ones which consist in reaching artificial goals, all for the sense of fulfillment which comes from striving towards those, and sports are probably the most socially acceptable surrogate activities. You would be hard pressed to find someone who collects insects and is vocal about it, but sports enjoyers on the other hand, whether participants or spectators, tend to turn it into their identity, something they can relate to with other people.
To be fair to the practice, engaging in sports rather than merely being a spectator is physically healthy (provided it is within reasonable bounds), and there is a sense of aliveness which can only come from being connected with one's body, which is provided by sports to some degree, as a well as a form of self-overcoming which the greatest athletes embody in the mastery of their craft. While I have my problems with sports, those who engage with it are often able of very impressive feats, and the extent of their efforts cannot be denied, which is particularly commendable in a world which is geared towards removing effort and difficulty of any kind.
But there is still the central problem which all surrogate activities share, which is that we are free to engage in them precisely because they are utterly inconsequential to our lives and the direction of our society. In other words, the business of sports is so big because it provides distraction to the masses and allows the system to keep going where it is supposed to go, namely, more and more technological progress, no matter all the destruction that it creates through its externalities.
We are powerless to shape our lives in the ways which really matter, but are provided by innumerable "choices" for the trivial decisions, hence all the different hobbies we can have, meanwhile our ability to house and feed ourselves can only happen within the market and the restrictions of the law, not on our terms. This is because the system is dependent on predictability and integration, which is why it cannot allow people to simply do as they wish when it comes to their livelihood. If people were allowed to freely live in the forest for example, assuming they had the willingness and skills to do so, it would impede on any business which tore down the forest for its wood. Moreover, people living in the wood might live to uncontrolled disasters such as wild fires, which provides a rationalization for why systematization is necessary and even good.
This is true for all the activities of the system, which is why the law is justified on the grounds that people would be violent murderers without it, and why school is deemed necessary otherwise people would be illiterate and uninterested in anything—which ironically is practically the case for many young people today, despite the fact that they are schooled from a young age.
It is interesting then to compare sports with activities which are important to how we live. Work by and large does not have any real stakes for most modern people, which is why so many bullshit jobs exist in the first place, and it doesn't have any meaning either, which is probably why people watch sports in their free time, but would never want to voluntarily work extra time.
More importantly, it does not have any real freedom, for the same reason as mentioned above. You might or might not be doing something important in your job, but what is certain is that you are very likely working under someone who doesn't want to give you any genuine form of freedom. Again, just like the system allows choice when it comes to trivial decisions, a boss might give us the freedom to come dressed however we want, but we are still expected to clock in on time, to do the work as needed, and to care about the profits about the company, instead of let's say our own rhythm for doing things, or our own generosity towards the customers, or even our own opinion of what we need to work on in the first place.
We all know this deep down, whether we admit it or not, but work is so dreadful that no one writes stories about regular people being at regular work, that most people want to do everything but work in their free time, hence sports, and that one of the biggest dreams that people have in our times is to have a financial sitution that would allow them to not work.
Modern work is alienating us, from ourselves, our peers, and from the Universe at large, but this pales in comparison with warfare, the epitome of the horrors and absurdity of our world, a society which can only cannibalize itself in the name of "progress". Warfare has far bigger stakes than what has been mentioned in this piece, but it is also totally inhumane. Sports exhibit sportsmanship whereas warfare doesn't, simply because the former doesn't have any real stakes, allowing some type of conscious quality to shine through once in a while, whereas the overwhelming pressure of survival in the latter forces people to put utilitarian needs above all else.
But stakes do not make for meaning, because ultimately warfare is also devoid of it, since the system which prompts it to happen is meaningless, not grounded in the simple direct meaning of experience, the serene beauty of the sky that we take for granted, or the fascinating details that the ripples on the surface of a river produce, or the distinct way in which a loved one laughs, none of which are useful to the system which crushes conscious quality under the boot of utilitarian quantity.
There can be meaning in a struggle for survival, but here we should distinguish the hero's journey of the man mastering his environment to survive, and then eventually thrive, so that he may provide for his tribe, and the soldier being forced to fight for a country which went to war because it needs the oil buried in the ground of another country. The former case is embedded in a larger, selfless context, the unity of the tribe and the culture which arises from it, whereas the latter is prompted by egoic systems that do everything they can to maintain themselves.
This is why we respect the hunters who put their life on the line to feed the village, and why they themselves come back with a sense of accomplishment, whereas we can't help but look at soldiers with a sense that something tragic occurred, that brave men put their life on the line all to maintain an absurd reality, the perpetual growth of the technological system which has no need for the things we care about, the conscious qualities in our life.
Just like we must distinguish between the athletes and the absurd games that they play, we must respect the soldiers who were willing to risk their life for something bigger than themselves, sometimes at a shockingly young age, but who also fought for a system which is ultimately insane, which can only prioritize its own growth over the well-being of anything else it runs into contact with.
Coincidentally, the origin of sports is commonly attributed to have been a substitute for warfare during times of peace, which also doubled as a form of entertainment since private access to music or a television did obviously not exist in the past. Today we no longer feel the need to get men ready to fight in war, though that might quickly change in the years to come, 1 because our world is more so focused on the extractive force that machines provide, including the social machines called institutions, rather than getting soldiers and managers to extract labor from foreign countries. Fundamentally, nothing has changed, it's just that money is a far more effective form of coercion than brute force is, since the former can be scaled up and decentralized, and doesn't provide for an easy target for rebellion compared to the latter.
In the privileged world of the West however, we can pretend that things are good because all the horrors have been exported elsewhere, including the 'elsewhere' of poorer parts of the West, but even then there is still a horror that unfolds when you are willing to look past appearances, the fact that everything by and large is hollow. From mass-media, to junk food, to meaningless work, to characterless people, to inane entertainment, even the lands of relative abundance cannot (or are not incentivized to) provide anything genuinely good, everything is just sort of ... okay, but nothing more.
This hollowed "culture" is why people turn to watching sports, which has become one of the few interesting and non-offensive things that people can talk about with one another, because it's one of the few things that our atomized world keeps dangling in front of people to keep them entertained. It's also why people talk about the weather, or holidays, or the news, or food, or even more depressingly, school way after they have graduated from it, because the common ground of experience in the modern world is basically non-existent outside of those things.
There is no overarching context, there is no collective meaning which informs our actions and decisions, which is very likely why sports is such a common way for lonely people to bond with one another. It's not just a surrogate activity, for some people, it's a surrogate religion, with its angels to root for and devils to cheer against, with its myths—the story of how Usain Bolt set the world record for the 100m race—but without any God, which is why it is so trivial at the end of the day, and why learning much about sports feels like such a waste of time, because it is a waste of conscious life.
1 As I am writing this, the 12th of March 2026, the war between Ukraine and Russia is still going on, even though it is clear that Ukraine has no hope and that Russia has long since focused on minimizing the damage on its side, since the victory has been guaranteed for a while. And much noise has been made recently about the war in Iran, which really stretches back over much longer considering the relationship between the Middle East and Israel, and the involvement of the United States that started with Iraq, there is really nothing new under the sun.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Deathculture Meaning Sports Entertainment Attention Surrogate Apathy
2026-03-13