Viewers vs. Doers: The Rise of Spectatoritis

As a student of history, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this odd philosophy that there's something wrong with watching other people do things that you will never do.<p>Living vicariously is the essence of being human. It's why we have language, and stories, and imagination, and all the wetware required to support these things. Dogs can't tell stories about other dogs in such a way that their canine audience is moved to weep or cheer. Whereas humans line up to hear stories about three-thousand-year-old semi-mythical events. Then they draw practical conclusions from those stories.<p>I don't see why it's so terrible that I'd rather watch, say, a deep-sea fisherman risk his life than try deep-sea fishing myself. We have no shortage of deep-sea fishermen -- in fact, what we have is a shortage of fish. And the same principle definitely applies to soldiers: Every real soldier who can be replaced by a Team Fortress player, or a History Channel viewer, represents a net win for humanity.

I used to spend a lot of my weekends watching my AFL team, Collingwood, losing. Then I saw the episode of Seinfeld where he did his bit about sports fans:<p>"We're a little too into sports in this country, I think we gotta throttle back. Know what I mean? People come home from these games, 'We won! We won!' No, they won - you watched."<p>"They won, you watched." It really resonated with me. I was spending quite a bit of cash to watch a bunch of fit guys try to kick a ball better than another bunch of fit guys in different coloured jumpers. If 'my guys' won I felt good and if they didn't, I didn't. It seemed ridiculous to me. If they won, why should I feel happy? I don't even know them! And if they lost, why should I feel upset? It wasn't my fault.<p>I haven't really been to an AFL game since then and barely watch it on TV. If Collingwood makes a final, like they did last year, then yes, I want them to win and I will watch the game on TV. But it doesn't go any further than that.<p>Giving up on the spectating didn't make me go out and play football myself, but I do mostly spend my spare time being creative rather than just spectating.

I'd like this article a lot more if it weren't sort of gratuitously about gender in a strangely jarring way.<p>The underlying point about spectatoritis is interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with what it means to "become a man" or developing a "manly 'philosophy of leisure'". Surely plenty of people of both genders are suffering from spectatoritis, and not only in spectator sports (and even there, there are plenty of female fans as well).<p>Nash's book is not explicitly gendered in that way, though it was written in 1938 and so does have a more implicit built-in assumption that it's probably addressing men (and it does use "man" and "men", but in the now-old-fashioned sense that's sort of gendered but ambiguously so and might also mean "people in general", depending on context). But it's not really accusing its readers of being insufficiently masculine; it's accusing them of being too passive, which seems more to the point.

I'm always amazed by the number of 20 and 30 year old men who'd rather watch football than play it.

My dad always described television as watching other people live life. It was an observation I'd forgotten. Thanks for posting this article and reminding me of it.

I loved this article. Mostly because I see a bunch of "spectatoritis" around me all of the time. I swear that the inland empire is just a bunch of passionless zombies living their lives waiting to die. I really don't see any get up and go or any enthusiasm for much of anything and this article mirrors my observations perfectly.

What about video games?

If 95% of people were not fraggles, sheep and spectators, then a lot of things in this world would not get done as quickly as they do now. People think that the innovation phase of a project is the hard part, but in some ways, it's just the seed, you need an army of autonomous humans to do the mundane work to make the innovation take root and flourish.<p>If everyone on Earth had (and acted upon) Earth-shaking visions like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Ford, then the world would be full of amazing ideas that never get carried out to their potential. We need the drones, workers and the queen. Too many queens and the hive dies.

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