Category: psychology

The Familiar Fiber

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“The Exorcist is the scariest movie of all time,” Gary said. 

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t think it was that scary.”

“WHAT?!”

“It just didn’t reach me on that level,” I told him. “It was a really good movie. The acting, the plot believability, all that, but when it evolved to the scary scenes, I just wasn’t frightened. I expected it to scare the beans out of me, because everyone said it would, and maybe that was it. Maybe I sat there waiting for it to scare me in a way I’ve never been scared before.” 

Horror and comedy, more than any other genres, are about time and place, state of mind, and expectation. Expectations can ruin the best of the best, and if it were possible for me to watch The Exorcist without expectation, it might have terrified me. The same holds true with all genres to some extent, but expectation seems to affect comedy and horror more. 

If the author of a story, be it movie or book, is able to bring us in slowly, progressively, and strategically, they might bring us to that place, but it’s touch-and-go. Everyone from the writers to the director, to the editor, and everyone else involved might think they have a hit, but no one knows how an audience will react. 

Some audience members stubbornly resist. “This isn’t real,” they say with their arms folded, “and I’m not buying it.” Of course, it’s not real, but it’s your job as an audience member, if you want to have any fun, is to suspend your disbelief for just a moment to get in to the movie. I did not stubbornly resist The Exorcist. I wanted it to scare me. I tried to invest everything I had into that movie, but it just didn’t reach me on that level.

The more common description of a movie reaching us on another level is “striking a nerve”. We could also twist the term ‘striking a nerve’ to describe how a movie gets under our skin, though some reserve that term for something annoying. The point is that quality horror flicks dig past the superficial, goosebump layer of the epidermis into the nerve, and tap into the axons, the cord-like groups of fibers in the center of a nerve, that we call the familiar fibers. If we want to move the illustration further, we could say that the great horror movies reach into the neuromuscular junction, but you get the point. If we’ve always had a deep seated fear of clowns, for instance, Stephen King’s It gave us one of the most horrific experiences we’ve ever had reading the book or watching the movie. Those with a lifelong fear of dogs found Cujo one of the scariest book/movies for the same reasons. For reasons that weren’t clear to me at the time, no movie tapped into my familiar fibers better than The Blair Witch Project. 

“That’s the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen,” my friend said, soon after seeing it, “and your movie recommendations will forever be tainted by the fact that you suggested that I waste my time and money on that stupid, stupid movie.”

I recommended The Blair Witch Project to everyone I knew, and they all, pretty much, had the same reaction. I found their reactions inexplicable, because they shared my taste in movies, and we were always on the lookout for the next great horror. I thought I found it in The Blair Witch Project. I thought it was a masterpiece, and while I figured they probably wouldn’t love it as much as I did, I didn’t expect them to question my taste in movies forever after. After wrestling with this, I eventually came to the conclusion that time and place are everything for some movies. (Expectations, as I wrote, is another huge movie killer, and I may have done this with The Blair Witch Project, as others did for me with The Exorcist.)

The time and place element obviously made a huge impact on my opinion of the The Blair Witch Project. I was in a theater, on opening night, at the midnight hour, with a bunch of teenagers who wouldn’t shut up. When they’re chitter-chatter, and the giggles (those blasted gigglers!) lasted 20 minutes into the flick, I thought I wasted good money. I didn’t think the giggles would ever end. They did. 20 minutes into the movie, The Blair Witch Project achieved what I considered impossible at the time: it silenced over 100 teenagers. The transformation from claustrophobic noise to claustrophobic silence ended up giving that silence a little extra weight. The sudden, creepy silence heightened my senses, and managed to narrow my perspective to tunnel vision so well that I was almost spiritually immersed in the movie. 

I could smell the burning wood from the campfire. I wouldn’t say that I was ever afraid of camping, or the darkness in the trees surrounding us, but the environment always creeped me out a little. The environment, and the compulsion to speak in whispers, is probably what makes ghost stories told by campfire so creepy. My goosebumps were always out before they started their campfire stories, and they didn’t have to do much to finish the job. The makers of Blair Witch tapped into a level of familiarity for me so well that I could smell the burning wood in the middle of the movie theater. I was there with the characters of the movie, in all ways but one. 

Then, the screaming started. I don’t know if the young girls in the theater, seated over my shoulder, took classes to help them reach the registers they did, or if their talent was granted by God, but I had my hand on my heart on more than one occasion. Those teenagers couldn’t have done a much better job if they orchestrated a plan to scare the hell out of me.

Based on that experience alone, I now tell anyone interested in watching a horror movie to try to duplicate my experience. “Even if you have to pay for the admission of a bunch of screaming, teenage girls. It might run into hundreds of dollars, but if you enjoy horror as much as I do, you might just have a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Follow the steps I did, have them annoy you in the beginning, then tell them to wrap you in silence so weighted that if someone drops a straw on the ground, everyone will turn around to see what the hell just happened. Then, in those key moments, have these young, teenage girls scream as loud as they can in your ear, in a manner that rattles you to bone.” 

Another element that separated me from my arm-folding brethren when it came to The Blair Witch Project was that I walked into that theater wanting to believe it. “But supernatural witches aren’t real,” Gary said to explain why he thought the movie was such an epic waste of his time and money. 

“Hey, if you’re having problems sleeping at night, because you think witches, vampires, or werewolves are knocking at your door, I’ll tell you they’re not real,” I told Gary. “If we’re about to watch a movie about them though, I’m going to pretend that they’re real for however long that movie lasts. It’s not the moviemaker’s job to convince you that they’re real. It’s your job to pretend, so that you can have a little fun in life. When I watch a movie, I grant the artist access to my innards. It’s a frame of mind I grant the actors and the director, and it’s their job to avoid screwing it up.” 

Not only was I there, smelling the campfire, but prior to entering the theater that night, I saw the movie’s faux documentary on Syfy, and I was a frequent guest on the The Blair Witch Project webpage. It was my first experience with web marketing, and that might have added a chunk to the believability for me. I can’t remember any of the details of the website, save one. One little nugget grabbed me. It was a note that suggested someone found five cannisters of film in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland that the characters created, and the movie makers edited it down to 90 minutes. The Blair Witch Project was also my introduction to the cinematic technique some call “found footage,” “lost footage,” or “shaky cam.”   

As a result of all of the above, I now move my listing of The Blair Witch Project as the greatest horror movie ever made to one of the best experiences, I’ve ever had watching a film. It was a time and place experience that that no film maker will ever be able to replicate for me, for whatever the opposite of baggage is, as in he brought some baggage with him into that situation, I had that, and it wasn’t just an open mind. I was supercharged for this movie, because I wanted to be scared. I wanted this movie to be true, minus the murder of course, but that desire, combined with all of the above, is what made The Blair Witch Project one of my favorite movie experiences of all time. 

I’ve yet to watch The Blair Witch Project a second time, in a more traditional setting, because knowledge and facts have a stubborn way of ruining emotional experiences, and I don’t want to ruin one of the best experiences I’ve ever had watching a movie. 

The big debate at the time was whether or not The Blair Witch Project actually happened. Most of us appreciated it as a clever marketing campaign, but others believed that it was an actual event and the actors involved actually died in the film. If you said you enjoyed The Blair Witch Project back then, you were lumped in with “the believers”. I believed The Blair Witch Project for the 81 minutes it played on the screen, just like I believed in ghosts during Poltergeist, that cars could come to life in Christine, and that aliens were abducting people in Fire in the Sky. None of these movies made a dent in my overall belief system, but I thought all of them (save Christine) were great movies. When the furor over believers vs. nonbelievers died down, 86% on of the over 250,000 fans rated The Blair Witch Project positively on Rotten Tomatoes and 81% of critics did. I don’t post these numbers to say I was right, and the naysayers were wrong. I do think it validates my argument that once we gain some distance from silly arguments, we can see a good movie for what it is. 

The citizen critic can now post reviews on everything from the best horrors and comedies to the best and worst plumbers on various websites. We can recommend others watch, don’t watch; read, don’t read; and don’t even bother calling this fence specialist. There’s nothing on the line for the citizen critic, as they don’t benefit from a positive review, and they see no ramifications from a negative one. Some of us suspect that professional critics benefit from positive reviews in ways that lead us to believe the citizen critic is more honest. We’re probably wrong in most cases, but we tend to trust citizen reviews more than professional ones for this reason. The citizen critic is not afraid to let the internet know what they really think. The problem with their reviews though, is that tastes and experiences are so relative and subjective. If someone says the subject of the movie “is not real, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool,” they’re going to give it one star. One person’s The Blair Witch Project is another person’s THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT!!! Comedy is as subjective as horror, and both are relative to the person, and they’re subjective and relative to our experiences in life. One citizen critic might find the humor in Peter Seller’s humor in The Pink Panther dated, but we might find their current favorite comedy too juvenile. They might find Pulp Fiction so personally offensive that they wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and The Godfather, Citizen Kane, and Gone with the Wind might be overrated, time pieces that haven’t aged well. The point is, we can now find negative reviews for every movie, album, and electrician, and if we read them, and heed their warning, we might never watch classic films, read classic literature, or listen to some of the greatest albums ever made. As an artist who tries to tap into those familiar neuromuscular junctions, I now empathize with anyone who tries to create art. As such, I try to keep my reviews, objective, impersonal, and constructive. 

[ If you enjoy this article, there will be more available soon at The Unfunny, and be sure to subscribe to continue to read articles from Rilaly.] 

Why So Insidious?

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“Why so serious?” – The Dark Knight, Christopher and Jonathon Nolan 

Why so cynical? Cynicism is truth. Cynicism is real. Scene: The cynical character confronts an optimistic, positive one. The positive character has no reply. Why does he just sit there and take it? The underlying truth is finally coming out, and the positive character just can’t handle it. We favor the cynical character, because, “He’s just being real with us.” He’s gritty, she’s so dark, and the cynical are no longer afraid to speak truth to power. The truth is that your precious, little world is awful, your neighbor is trash, and you’re probably no better. Cynicism is alarming, scary, hilarious, and so insidious.

“Harmful but enticing: seductive.” – Merriam-Webster.com’s definition of insidious.

Why so insidious? Want to write a best-seller? Bring the pain (muderporn). We readers crave a taste, a dose, and a heaping forkful of the worst elements of the worst moments of another’s life. We don’t want it too familiar, of course, yet we enjoy watching it from a distance. We may not bring it up in polite company, but if someone else does, we join in, and it’s difficult for us to hide the excitement in our voice. 

Why so violent? Violent narratives require a generous portion of brutality, but the most successful writers define it by clever and intelligent means. Undefined brutality is fine if we’re writing a mob narrative, or a historical recount of the Ku Klux Klan or Nazi, Germany, because they come backloaded with such a brutally violent history, but if we’re going to write about serial killers, we need to employ some level of poetry, symbolism, or some other form of intellect in their acts for it suggests the killer (and their writer) is surprisingly intellectual. In the cat-and-mouse game with the police, writers use law enforcement officials to define the serial killer’s intellect. “He’s obviously incredibly intelligent,” they will say at the outset, and at some point, in the chase, they say, “He’s too smart to fall for that.” If the writer can combine the killer’s savage sense of brutality with some ode to Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare, and/or Biblical references, it illustrates a shocking intellect that will lead to best-sellers, ratings, and clickbait. 

I’ve created fictional characters with whom I developed a mostly platonic relationship, and the answer to the question of what I was going to do with them didn’t involve whether or not they were going to commit violence, but how much? 

“We might develop a crush on non-violent stories,” I said to explain this predilection, “but if we’re going to fall head-over-heels in love, there has to be some violence involved, or at least the threat thereof.” 

Why so awful? We want to read/watch about awful people doing awful things to one another, with a dash of humor thrown in to further define, or even slightly contradict, their awfulness. At some point in the timeline, the awful writers began adding clever humor to add an element of the casual and the common place to their violence, and we loved it. If it’s not love we experience, it’s some complicated adherent. We’ll repeat a clever and humorous line with a chuckle. We might even knowingly invite such seductive characters into our home. We’ve all seen movies of enraged violent people, and it just doesn’t connect the way the calm, clever killers do. Look at our favorite performances, most of them involve actors portraying the most awful characters imaginable with a little bit of flair. The message to writers is clear: if you want gain, bring the pain, and it doesn’t hurt to add a little levity to their refrain. 

Why so artistic? Does art reflect society, or does society reflect art? Is society as evil as artists of modernity want us to believe, or do we interpret their attempts as beautiful works of art? Those who aren’t afraid to expose us to the truth of what’s going on in their neighborhood receive special accolades. Their exposes might be dark and negative but that’s their truth. Is it truth, or is it an embellishment intended to generate sales? I can see you, with your fingers poised above your keyboard, ready to defend your favorite book, movie, or TV show. Your reply will include something regarding how I can’t understand the plight of someone who might not experience the comfortable lifestyle I do. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but would you be so defensive if we were discussing a positive, uplifting narrative? “There’s nothing wrong with light-hearted fare, of course,” you might say, “but there’s no question that gritty, dark, and cynical are definitely more artistic.”

Why do repetitive? We love violence in our art, and we identify with cynicism as truth, but what is that truth? As we work our way through controversial, provocative portrayals of the truth, we often hear, see, and learn the same reportage, fictional and otherwise, over and over. How many times do we have to hear, watch, and read the same cynical exposés on the same institutions before we accept their portrayals as truth? How many otherwise beloved and trusted institutions in our society are the most corrupt in these narratives? There’s the member of the civil service, the man of religion, or military man you thought you could trust who turns out the most corrupt among them in our controversial and cutting edge stories. This trope is almost as repetitive as the all families are dysfunctional trope. We all understand that an author needs to introduce conflict, be it external or internal, but these tropes are repeated so often that most of us can pick out the good guys and bad guys in an ensemble narrative before the actors have read one word of the script. Through sales, we’ve encouraged storytellers to evolve to nothing but hardcore, unapologetic cynicism to appeals to our worldview. 

Why so dark, angry, and hopeless? To paraphrase a line from Cool Hand Luke, “That’s the way he wants it,” and we want it dark, cynical, negative, hateful, and violent. Most of us have no violent tendencies. We never have, and we never will. Yet, we won’t read a book, watch a movie, TV show, or play a video game that doesn’t involve at least some hint of violence? What does that say about us? If we are of a stable mind that isn’t easily influenced, I don’t think it says much, but is it human nature to think that the ultimate, or final, truth about human nature is that it’s awful, nasty, and we’re all headed for dark, gritty truth?

Why no happy endings? It wasn’t too long ago that the market demanded a happy ending, no manner how dark and gritty a fictional piece was. We enjoyed watching awful people doing awful things to each other, but we all knew that some over-the-top, big, sloppy happy ending was coming. We knew the movie would end with someone drinking an exotic, adult beverage with a tiny umbrella in it, in front of an impossibly white, sandy beach? Everyone knew that somehow, someway, it would all end happy for the players involved. It became a long-running joke. Those who concern themselves with such things say that there wasn’t one particular movie that brought an end to this, but a series of thematically complex narratives of the late 60’s early 70’s that challenged the whole idea of the necessity of happy endings in movies. If this is true, it was a long, insidious arc that led us to demand that our stories end in despair for the purpose of being true, while illuminating us about the despair around the world. When we watch happy endings now, they seem so anticlimactic that movie makers have responded by leaving one last hint that the bad guy/monster might might still be alive somewhere.  

“If you want a happy ending go Disney or some other manufacturer of dreams, cause you ain’t gonna find it here.”

I come at this from an advantageous position, because I led a sheltered life until I was about fifteen. I received a lot of grief for believing that most of humanity was good, and I still do, but when I was young and impressionable, my worldview encountered a special brand of the-world-is-junk, and a dose of everyone is a piece of junk. “You shouldn’t trust anyone outside your home,” they instructed me, “and you should probably be skeptical of them.” The contrast to everything I knew and believed couldn’t have been more shocking if it was delivered with defibrillator paddles. I initially considered their skeptical cynicism a romantic notion, and I was angry that my authority figures shielded me from the truth for so long. The more I learned this outlook, the more I embraced it, acclimated to it, and I accepted it as truth. The repetition was such that I knew if I didn’t adjust and assimilate, I would be nothing more than a naïveté who would eventually meet my demise as a result of some proverbial pack of wolves who would take advantage of it. As with all constant and repetitive messaging, it eventually reached a tipping point for me. Looking back, I probably needed that dose of cynicism to round out my wide-eyed optimism, but when the “theys” in my inner-circle continued pouring gasoline on this fire, I realized that, like uplifting positivism, there’s a point of diminishing returns of too much cynicism too. “Just because it’s awful, negative, and cynical doesn’t always mean it’s true,” I began telling my “theys” after I hit that tipping point. I don’t know if that revelation proved as shocking to them as their revelations did me, but they couldn’t come up with anything to counter it. 

When we seek the truth, we often get bounced around a bit, until we eventually find it nestled somewhere in the in-between. Are we more cynical or optimistic, or are we somewhere in-between, and what’s in the in-between? 

As the new saying goes, “If you ever want to know where you stand are as a culture, look to the major marketing firms.” They pour millions into researching human nature and the zeitgeist for the purpose of appealing to us in their marketing campaigns? When they create advertisements for their clients do they seek a truth, or something we generally perceive to be true? Marketing departments don’t necessarily seek to tell us the truth, but their extensive studies find a truth that we consider true enough to move products, and they have obviously reached the conclusion that our outlook is pretty bleak. They understand that times are tough, but their client is here to help. If we just purchase their new and improved product, we’ll find our days and nights bigger, brighter, and more productive, because we’ll have more time to do what we always wanted to do. They pay attention to our intricacies, and they’re saying that we have a negative, cynical and all hope is lost mentality. It’s The Beatles, “It’s getting better all the time. It couldn’t get much worse.” It’s Dickens’ “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” It’s the in-between.

I haven’t poured tons of money into extensive research on humanity, but I think we could all use a healthy dose of something else, and it doesn’t have to be uplifting. It can’t be, because uplifting is cringe, but it could be something different. It could be something dotted with refreshing honesty without being overly cynical. It can also be something other than the college thesis paper, or dissertations, writers insert into every song we hear, and every TV show and movie we watch. When I watch these over-the-top insertions, I can’t help but think, “Hows about we just go for entertainment, so we can forget the serious, deep, and the meaningful for just a moment?” 

Wishing and Baseball

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“I wish my son was more aggressive at the plate,” a friend of mine said.

You wish your son was more aggressive? I could go through the list of pseudo-humorous things I wish I had, but you know that joke. I want things, and I need things, but I’d feel foolish suggesting that I wish something were true, because I know that that someone would turn on me and say, “Well, go get it!”

This has always been one of my least favorite responses because it’s obnoxious, tedious (because everyone says it) and true. Yet, who is more tedious and obnoxious, the person who says, “Go get it!” or the person who sits down and whines and wishes?   

Wishing is for small children and people who find genies in a bottle. For the rest of us, it’s a waste of breath, unless we’re going to “Go get it!” A couple of years ago, I wished my kid wouldn’t strike out so often. I wanted him to do better, so we went out to the backyard, then we left the comfy confines of home to open baseball diamonds and batting cages to go get it. Did we get better? We did, because we did it so often that it happened. 

Prior to all that, my kid was shocked and devastated by the fact that he wasn’t the athlete he thought he was, and aren’t we all? Our delusional dreams and projected images of greatness eventually, and painfully, hit a controversial wall called reality. I label the wall controversial, because soon after I told my kid he wasn’t better than he thought, I knew that would get me in trouble with positive reinforcement crowd. After I introduced him to the reality of the situation, we set about getting him better. The latter, needless to say, doesn’t happen after one, two, or three twenty-minute sessions. This is a time-consuming, frustrating, and eventually rewarding process.

I’m the type of guy who thinks, perhaps unreasonably at times, that everything is my fault. If I can’t access a website, for example, I think it’s my fault. It might have more to do with the site’s administrator, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that I did something wrong. When my son struck out so often, I knew it was partly my fault. The kid was so young that he didn’t know how to do things himself. He had to be taught, and I wasn’t teaching him. I forced him to endure mind-numbing hours of hitting, fielding, and pitching so often that he begged for it to be over. He wanted to play Mario Odyssey, watch YouTube, and do anything and everything he could find that was less taxing. We called our workouts forty, forty forty. Forty hits, forty ground balls, or pop-ups, and forty swings. After doing this for years, when I now see a kid on a baseball field have trouble with the fundamentals of baseball, I can tell just how much time their dad has spent helping them get it.

My job, and your job, if you wish it to be true, is to source the problem and correct it. Baseball is a game, and ten and unders are going to make a ton of mistakes. If they make the same mistakes, over and over in a manner that cries out for resolution, I see it as my job to find a way to help him fix it. If you don’t have the time to personally see to it that the error is corrected, do you have the money to hire an instructor, and if neither of those avenues are available to you, what can you do to try to make it happen, other than sitting in the stands, wishing it were true.  

Some of us are visual learners, some are auditory, and others are reading and writing learners. If your goal is to help your child learn how to play baseball, there’s no avenue better than just doing it so many times that he learns how to do it. It’s what psychologists call Kinesthetic Learning, or what the rest of us call doing it. 

It’s possible for a kid to learn another way, I suppose, but I’ve never explored it. What’s the best way to learn Math, swimming, bowling, or baseball? They have to do it so often that they learn. Malcolm Gladwell suggest we can do anything to a decent level of prowess by investing 10,000 hours into doing it. It sounds so obnoxiously simple that it can’t be the solution, so we read books on it, watch YouTube videos, and invest in some sort of professional tutoring. All of these elements are instructive and can be used to supplement doing, but it’s so obvious that it hardly seems worthy of mentioning that nothing beats doing something so often that we do it better. 

***

Once our kid learns and earns a certain level of prowess, how do we take them to the next level? 

“If you want your kid to advance, get him into a select league,” they say, and they’re right. But, and there’s always a but, a kid learns by doing. We can say he might get better playing a higher level competition, but what if he’s not having fun at the next level? My son is currently on a team composed almost entirely of his friends from school. On this team, my son plays, and he strengthens his relationships with his friends while playing. He looks forward to games, and he has a lot of fun playing in them. That’s far more important to me than advancing him to the next level with the hope that it will strengthen his abilities in such a way that he might continue to play baseball in high school, college, and the Majors. This is the dream, but is it their dream or ours? When we take a look at the numbers, we know that the chances of him playing beyond high school are minimal, and while looking at those numbers we need to ask ourselves who are we really aiming to please? Are we seeking a way for him to be the exception to these ratios for his eventual happiness, or are we looking to satisfy our dream of one day being one of those parents who have front row tickets to our kid’s first major league start? If we follow the plan of making sure he’s having fun, we’ll turn down that invitation for a select league to keep him in a league where he’s having the most fun. We also do this to prepare for the day when he meets the extent of his talent and ability, and our dreams come to a crashing halt. When this happens, we want to look at our son and say, “Well, we had a lot of fun along the way.” 

Last season, a kid named Jimmy received an invitation to advance to a select team over my son. My vicarious impulse was jealousy. I thought my son was better, but I’m biased. Jimmy was, at least, comparable to my son in talent. Flash forward a couple games into this season and Jimmy is not playing on that select team. He’s sitting on the bench. I have no idea if this is a commentary on Jimmy’s ability, compared to the rest of the team, but bottom line, he’s sitting on the bench, and if he’s not playing, he’s not learning, and he’s not advancing. But playing at a higher level lifts all boats. The classic example, in another sport, is Sidney Crosby. Crosby was the youngest brother always playing with his older brothers and their friends. Crosby needed to be better just to compete with them. Crosby became better, and he became so good that he was a first pick in the NHL Draft, and he became one of the best players in the NHL. Crosby, however, was playing against them, as opposed to riding the bench. My guess is this kid named Jimmy is experiencing some next-level play in practice, but nothing beats doing it in a game.  

The select teams also requires a greater commitment to baseball, and I don’t think this commitment will be advantageous. Right now, my son plays a number of sports and he is learning the art of taekwondo. If he commits more of his time to baseball, he will have to sacrifice those other sports. Why would we do this? He has a lot of fun doing all that other stuff too. I think playing those sports, and learning the art of taekwondo, provides him a well-rounded learning experience, and if he chooses a sport to focus on at some point, that will be a decision for him to make. Right now, he’s just having fun, and I see no reason to advance the needle. 

As with everything else in life, there are no easy answers, but there is one easy question. What are we doing with our free-time? Instead of watching the latest docu-drama on Netflix, or flipping through our phone for the next twenty minutes, why don’t we take a trip into the backyard and flip the ball around with our kid for twenty minutes a day, three-to-four times a week for a couple years. 

Baseball is baseball. It’s a sport, and some observe that the obsessive devotion to sports and games is trivial compared to all of the other, more important activities in life. If you think that, you’re right in general terms, but what are you currently doing with them that is so much more vital and crucial to their life? And what were your plans when you held them in your arms that day in the delivery room? Did you plan on letting them watch YouTube for another hour, so you could have a little more “me” time? What we’re talking about when we talk about baseball, soccer, flag football, or whatever ten and unders can do for a couple hours when they’ve not gaming, is committing to something so thoroughly that they develop a discipline, and a character-defining devotion. We’re talking about developing a discipline and a devotion to something they might remember, and they won’t remember conquering Mario Odyssey or flipping through various YouTube influencers. They will remember the days they spent playing sports with others, and the countless hours they spent playing in the backyard with you. It takes a level of commitment, a discipline, and devotion from both of you if you wish want him to get better, or more confident, the next time he steps on a baseball diamond, and that may prove trivial in the grand scheme of life to everyone in the world except for the two of you.