I grew up playing sports and loving sports as a child. I even played football and water polo throughout high school — winning the state championship in water polo my senior year. As a boy, I was greatly influenced by my social environment to not only love sports, but to also worship them. I worshiped them through clothes, conversation and the way I spent my leisure time.<\/p>\n
Sports always seemed to be like the weather — it was something that anyone could talk about at anytime. It also let the other person know that you’re okay — a regular, normal person.<\/p>\n
Like most Americans, I spent my weekends in front of the TV watching football, got excited as the Super Bowl approached and was depressed when the season was over. I found, like I did with video games<\/a>, that I wasted a huge amount of my time watching and talking about it.<\/p>\n As I got older (during my mid-twenties) I started to have aspirations for more meaningful things — writing, starting new businesses, psychology, etc… As my pursuits were juxtaposed to sports, it soon became clear just how completely meaningless professional sports were\/are. I began to ween myself off of sports — avoiding games on TV, checking scores on the Internet and conversations about sports.<\/p>\n Removing professional sports from my life allowed me to spend more time with my family, read more and focus on the things that I wanted to accomplish in life. It also made me stand out socially — not something I was going for, but it was unavoidable. When people would strike up conversations with me about an athlete or a big<\/em> game, I would have no idea what they were talking about. I tried to act like I had some clue of what they were talking about, just to avoid the awkwardness, but once they figure out that I was clueless, they generally gave me an emasculated response. It wasn’t with their words, but more with their facial expressions. It was usually an “are you a real man?” look.<\/p>\n