Asakiyume mita

My example for the day 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future

Maybe some of you read this closer to the time it came out, which was 2017. I only discovered it this morning when my daughter brought it to my attention. It's a hypertext meditation on an end state for human beings that involves them being eternally at play, and what, the story asks rhetorically, is a better game to play than American football?

Presentation-wise, the story is super cool--I enjoyed that aspect of it. But the scenario it sketches out--that people stopped aging and dying and reproducing abruptly in 2026, solved all their problems and have settled on entertaining themselves (in America, at least) with giant state-spanning games of wild-ass-rules football--just puts me in a state of profound existential anxiety. It's literally being trapped for eternity in a do-not-want situation.

I get that okay, this merely means that I'm not liking the example of play that the story is celebrating. The creator picked something particular that *he* liked--but you could do essentially the same story and have it be that everyone spends their days in fantastical treasure hunts or choreographing fantastical dances or whatever. (You'd miss out on the admittedly fun sports commentary if you chose those things, though.)

But I think that even if the story was told using a different form of play, I'd still want to run and hide in a closet far, far away.

There's an insistent, tyrannical complacency in the story. "Oh you think you'd like to spend eternity exploring, questing, learning, but no: you'd finish with all that and settle back for just playing. You think there might be new types of buildings, new art, new ANYTHING, but nope, after 15,000 years, it turns out that people like the look and feel of the year they attained immortality better than anything else." DEPRESSING.

I think also I'm bothered by an eternity in which no new people ever are born, where humanity is forevermore denied the experience of bringing up the next generation. I understand that if you're going to posit a world in which people live forever, you'd have severe logistical and resource problems if you don't also posit that they stop having kids, but that's why I don't like stories about material immortality. So long as we're dealing with the material world, I'm fine with death, thank you very much. Give me that sweet, sweet mortality and let me see the next generation go from tiny little buds to angular adolescents to ever deepening adults.

The story does have some touching moments in it. There's a point where a woman has been riding a tornado and she gets set down in Bee, Nebraska, and discovers the States Ballroom. She says,

I had the funniest thought up in that twister. I was thinking, "I have no idea where this thing is gonna throw me, but I know I'm gonna land on top of a story."

I wonder if there's a single place in the whole world that's never had a story. I bet not. I just about guarantee you there's no places like that in America. Every little square of it, every place you stomp your foot, that's where something happened. Something wild, maybe something nobody knows about, but something. You can fall out of the sky and right into some forgotten storybook.

That's beautiful. ... if just a teeny-tiny bit self-congratulatory about America

Maybe I'm just in a negative mood today.