Category: psychology

My Futile Fight to Divorce the Atlanta Falcons

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“Are you going to watch the NFL draft tonight?” John asked me.

“Of course,” I said, “and I’ll probably shout, ‘I want a divorce from this Gawdforsaken franchise’ again this year. It’s an annual tradition in my household.” 

Are you strapped into the fandom of a futile franchise? “What do you mean strapped?” The first image we have of being “strapped in” is that of a pilot, heading upward in for a flight into the wild, blue yonder. Now picture a pilot being strapped into a vessel headed downward. That is the futile flight the passengers on board the Atlanta Falcon have experienced lo’ these many years. 

Why do I continue to cheer the Atlanta Falcons on forty-eight years after I randomly chose to cheer them on when I was nothing but a seven-year-old, stupid kid who randomly pointed at them and said, ‘That’s the team I will cheer on.’ 

“You don’t choose your favorite team,” says a sentiment in Korean sport, “your team chooses you.” I get that, if we’re from Foxboro, Santa Clara, Cleveland, or the surrounding areas, it kind of makes sense. We have regional pride, personal history, and social bonds formed by everyone who forced us to cheer on the local team. What if we’re from an area, three to four hours’ drive time from the nearest professional organization, how they choose us? 

I was seven-years-old when I chose the Atlanta Falcons as the team I would cheer on for the rest of my life. I didn’t choose to cheer them on for the rest of my life, but that is what happened. The stadium the Falcons call home is fourteen hours’ drive time from where I live, I didn’t know anyone who cheered them on, and I’ve met very few fellow fans since. My dad didn’t know much about professional football, and he admitted he’d barely even heard of the Falcons. The Falcons also didn’t have any of my favorite college football players on their roster at the time, and they’ve only had a handful of them since. I had little-to-no connection to the Falcons at the time, and I still don’t in all the ways we’ve outlined here.

We All Like Winners

The first thing the uninformed, unaffiliated seven-year-old fan routinely does is cheer on the team their dad does. If they are unable to formulate that connection, they choose to cheer on one of the closest teams they can find. The final determining factor for them is the success of the team. When you’re seven-years-old, your favorite team says a lot about you, and you want people to think you’re a winner. In the 70s, everyone’s favorite team was either the Steelers or the Cowboys, or if you were naughty, you cheered on the Raiders. Those teams were the winners in the late 70s, our formative years, and everyone I knew selected one of those three teams. I met a few Vikings fans, but the general sentiment on them was that they weren’t good enough to win the Super Bowl. I knew one Dolphins fan, but he received some grief for cheering on a franchise whose time had passed. 

I decided to cheer on a team who didn’t have a past, a present, or future. A website called Quick Report lists the Atlanta Falcons as “the fourth worst NFL franchise of all time.” Another outlet called The Top Tens rates the Atlanta Falcons franchise as the 46th worst franchise in professional sports.

My favorite characterization of me is that I chose a team, independent of any influence, as a testament to the strong sense of individuality I obviously exhibited at a very young age. They were mine, all mine, and I didn’t have to share them with anyone, because no one else wanted them. Did I have an enviable streak of individuality at a young age? I did not when it came to books, music, movies, and other entertainment mediums. I liked what the cool kids told me to like, and when they turned on those players in the industry, I turned with them. I was not immune to peer pressure by any means, but I chose to thwart it in this one instance. Does that make sense to you, because it doesn’t to me. 

The only theory I have that makes any sense is color. I liked the pretty colors they wore on their uniforms. The Atlanta Falcons franchise chose to wear Red, white, and black. These were the same colors as my favorite college football team, the team that represents my states, and the university I attended. I’ve only purchased four cars in my life, all of them were either red or white, with black trim. Those colors obviously appeal to me. If you’ve followed the history of the Falcon’s uniform choices, however, you know they’ve switched the color of their uniforms from black and silver to now black, red and silver. I didn’t switch with them or from them. Why?

Philosophical and Emotional Layers

The next logical entry is the “lovable losers” tag that we used to apply to the Chicago Cubs franchise. I submit that the worst business move the Cubs ever made was winning the 2016 World Series. Why, because a large segment of the nation, outside Illinois and the surrounding region, cheered the Cubs on because they were lovable losers. They won the World Series in 1908, and they waited 108 years to win it again. Five generations of Cubs’ fans knew nothing of championship rings, and they loved it. They loved it so much that if we were to talk about their latest losing streak, their foibles in the post-season, the Cubs’ fan might chuckle with us. They knew all about it, and they loved it so much it was almost a crafty marketing gimmick, enhanced by the stories of jinxes, including the Curse of the Billy Goat, the Black Cat Incident, Steve Bartman Incident, and the Bernie Mac Jinx. The Falcons are nearing sixty-years as a franchise, and the franchise has the Eugene Robinson incident and, of course, 28-3. 

If the Atlanta Falcons fan, the WE, can make it past 28-3, what does that say about us? It suggests resilience, loyalty, and a sense that we’re all sharing in the struggle. Unwavering support is a badge of honor. If you’re a superfan, it becomes a part of who you are. It’s not just a preference, or it no longer is, it’s a reflection of your values, memories, and experiences. I becomes we, they becomes us, and those guys become our fellas fighting in the fields for glory. 

“I think we’re going to draft an Edge rusher this year,” we say, “because that’s been our greatest need for almost a decade.” Again, I know very very few Falcons’ fans in my locale, about fourteen-hours’ drive time from my home, so when I say, “we” and “us,” I’m not sharing a perspective with anyone I know, except the far-flung writers on a Falcons message board.

When a team like the Falcons become us/we, the theys on message boards drop “28-3!” on us in a snarky, smug way that attempts to force us to probe the tapestry of our being. The truly sad thing is that it took me a while to realize that the personal pain I felt, after that infamous choke job, was actually and factually absurd. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t actually on the field, missing a crucial block, throwing a crucial interception, snapping the ball with too much time on the clock, and electing to pass rather than run. I didn’t personally do any of that, I see that now, but I didn’t see that their (not our in this particular case) loss was not a reflection on my character. I actually had nothing to do with that loss. If it’s hard for you to grasp the idea that a rational, logical person couldn’t easily separate himself with the failure of images of football players on TV, you’ve never been, or known, a superfan.    

As difficult as it can be for a superfan to disentangle himself from the emotional entanglements that emphasize his existence, I am making strides. I now write things like this, “I realize I know little-to-nothing about the day-to-day decisions on personnel and any of the intricacies involved in their decision-making process. I’m not there for the day-to-day, I don’t see these players in practice, and I don’t know them personally.” I wrote on “our” Atlanta Falcon’s bulletin board, “but I think the decision they made was a mistake.” In that disclaimer, I effectively gained some psychological distance from the ‘us, we, and our’ lexicon we superfans usually use. 

I dropped that disclaimer on the billboard page many times, because I was trying to objectively say that I know my opinion is not only relatively and comparatively uninformed, and I know my opinion doesn’t matter, but I have to write it somewhere. No one ever replied to any of my posts. My guess is that this disclaimer might have been a buzz kill, because we all kind of know we don’t know squat, compared to the owner, the GM, the coach, and all of those in the hierarchy responsible for personnel decisions, but no one admits it. Such a disclaimer might also “pop” the delusion that we all know what we’re talking about, because we read it, watched it, and saw it in the games, so we know. Their ambivalence to my posts might also have something to do with the idea that it’s so obvious that we don’t know what we’re talking about that it really doesn’t need to be said. 

Here is another element to the post 28-3 Falcons’ loyalty, if we’re going to vicariously partake in whatever glory they achieve in victory, we must also commiserate with them in pain. Wrong, watching football on TV is supposed to be something we do to pass the time, and it should provide entertainment to our lives, nothing more and nothing less. Wrong, it’s not entertaining, it’s football. It’s not life and death, and some part of me knows that, but it’s often the difference between a smile on the face for the rest of the week, and a “We suck!” Mr. Grumpy Face week. 

“I look forward to [the offseason],” a man named Ryan Ray says in the GQ article cited aove, written by Tom Lamont. “The six to eight weeks when I don’t have to focus on anything to do with this football club. I long for it.” Ray also said, “Sometimes I wish I could just sit there without any bias [while watching a game], without any interest—but it’s not me. I’m tribal.”

I’ve been there Ryan Ray, and I feel you. I’ve watched numerous football games involving other teams, and I know how entertaining this game can be, when I have no rooting interest. I wish, like Ray, I could have fun watching a Falcons’ game and appreciate them from a distance. I wish I could sit back and appreciate the athletic exploits of Falcons’ players the way normal folks do, but when Falcons’ players succeed it’s nothing more than a relief that they didn’t fail yet again. I marvel at other players play at peak performance where the difference between winning and losing can be mere inches, or the subtle juke the runner puts on a defender that only a true fan of the sport can appreciate. When it’s all on the line, and my bias is in full force, I only experience abject failure, misery, and roughly three hours of what it must feel like to have clinical depression.

“If they make you so miserable, why don’t you just switch teams?” the non-sports fans might ask from Mount Simpleton. My dad asked me this question referencing the video games that made me scream like a lunatic. “If they make you this miserable, why don’t you just shut it off?” We laugh so hard at his simple-minded question that we didn’t even bother answering him. He didn’t get it. ‘You can’t just shut a game off, because you lost,’ was probably what we should’ve said. ‘That’s the whole reason we keep playing, to eventually and finally beat it. If you’re a gamer, you know this mindset without knowing that beating a game easily and often is actually kind of boring. If you can find a game that is so hard IT CHEATS! that’s the game you will play, to figure out, forever. We don’t quit working after we make our first million, that’s just the start, we don’t dump a lover when they start acting obnoxious, because their drama kind of, sort of makes them more dramatic, traumatic, and interesting in a way that’s tough to describe, and we don’t stop cheering for a professional sports team just because they’re 114 games under .500, and 10-14 in the playoffs without a ring. That’s the very reason to continue to cheer them on for life, because it says something about our character that we stay loyal to them no matter what. “NO MATTER WHAT happens!” Even if it means upping our Tricyclic Antidepressants (TCAs) and Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs) on those three special Sunday hours. It’s all worth it. “No, it’s not!” It is to me, is what I’m telling you. Wait, what we’re talking about again? Oh right, shut up!  

We’re passionate “prisoners [who are so] accustomed to our jails that we refuse means of escape,” Lamont writes, “Logic is not meant to be a part of the true fan’s equipment.” 

If we did our research, and we do, every year, we find that some teams just do it better. That’s rough, tough, and difficult to accept, so we think, “They CHEAT!” They don’t, but it’s easier to say that “and I can back it up!” than it is to sit through the incredibly long and boring NFL Draft and know that some teams obviously have better scouting staff members, General Managers, coaches, and all of the others in their hierarchy who help select the best player for their team. It’s easier to suggest something nefarious is going on than to admit that the franchises in Kansas City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco are going to make “the perfect” decision for their team for the next four-to-five years.

“Why can’t we find those guys?” we shout at the screen every year. We’ve even gone so far as to hire those who used to make those draft picks for their other franchises, and they somehow lose that magic touch when they go to work for us? How does that happen for 58 years? 

“On paper,” Lamont writes, “Intense fandom is absurd.”

If the Atlanta Falcons were a company that had a fifty-eight-year record of making poor decisions, I would’ve sold stock in their company so long ago I wouldn’t even remember owning it. If it were a TV show, movie franchise, or band that put out an inferior product year after year, we would’ve stopped enduring their stench of failure long ago. If our child continued to make such poor decisions, we’d have a “Come to Jesus” sit down moment with them. If it were a spouse, we might divorce them. Why don’t we seek a divorce from our team?

Lamont, quotes a therapist, saying, “People often seek me out because they are feeling stuck in a painful emotional pattern that just won’t let go.” She was probably speaking more generally, but we could easily attribute that quote to our super fandom. The therapist also said when she heard of some suffering from a mean case of super fandom, it reminded her of the mindset of those in a cult.  

She described a commonly reported reason that people give for staying in cults: the sunk cost fallacy. “People can’t leave because they’ve spent so much time and money and energy,” she explained. I read this, and I reread it, and it tells me that some of our deepest affiliations aren’t calculated but emerge from the fabric of our lives.

She later regretted likening it to extraction from a cult. “The situation,” she said, “had more in common with addiction, the high highs, the low lows, the swearing-offs, the shame-inducing returns to the cookie jar.”

“There is a fascinating page on NamuWiki, the Korean-language Wikipedia, that outlines the philosophical case against abandoning one’s team,” Lamont writes. “The act is known in Korea as 팀 세탁—team laundry—and it is understood to involve a paradox. You care enough [that] you want to put an end to your suffering, [but you also] care enough [that] you can’t.”

Some of us grow wiser as we age, and we learn when, where, why, and how to expend our resources. When it comes to sports, I’ve learned, and I’m still learning, with massive amounts of failure in this regard, how to not care so much. Wisdom has taught me that it’s just better for my mental well-being to if not “turn it off” as my dad might suggest, but to lower the volume on all my caring. The Salvation Army suggests that “caring is sharing”, and it’s true in most cases, but caring can be scary at times too. It should be fun to watch “my” guys play football, but it’s not. I do not enjoy it. So, I tape the game on the DVR, and I go outside and play catch with the boy. Then, I check the score of the game on one of my devices. If I find that we won the game that day, I watch the game and vicariously partake in the joy of victory. If they lose, I delete the entry on my DVR. Seeing the final numbers (the score) on a screen, gives me even more distance from the foolish notion I have that some of this final score if “my fault”. It’s also so much less painful than watching their total destruction, or long, slow destruction occur in real-time. If I were part of self-help Falcon fan group session, I would suggest all participants engage in this behavior for better mental-health.   

Some of our more obnoxious group members might suggest for even better mental-health, we should all consider a messy, complicated divorce from the “fourth worst NFL franchise of all time” and “the 46th worst franchise in professional sports”. If some of them could do it, I might applaud them, because I wouldn’t be able to do it. I will continue to cling to the handrail of this slowly sinking ship, in this tragic movie of my demise, where everyone in the audience is screaming, “Just jump off!” I’ve spent so much time, energy, and misspent passion on this inept franchise that even if you were to offer me a life raft, I might say, “Eh, I think I’m doing just fine right here.”

This might come as a shock to most superfine, but it doesn’t really matter what team we choose to cheer on. When fair weather fans tell me why they switch teams with regularity, they basically say, “I choose to cheer on winners, because I’m a winner.” I could say, ‘I’d like to see the science behind that,’ but I know it’s such a ridiculous statement that it’s not even worth challenging. Yet, is saying, ‘I choose to stick by my team no matter what happens, because it’s a testament to my character,’ just as ridiculous? Yes, it is. It makes no sense that I could never follow through on a complete divorce either, even though the temporary separations I’ve achieved over the years have proven great for my mental health. It’s illogical, absurd, and whatever adjectives we apply to superfans, but it is a part of our personal constitution that we stay loyal no matter what happens, and we think less of those who don’t. 

The Fragile Flame: When Genius Burns Out 

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“He got so smart he went crazy like that!” the regulars at The Family Liquor Store said about a fellow patron named David Hauser, and they always snapped when they said “That!” to punctuate the word. They didn’t just think he was so smart, and he went crazy, they thought there was a direct link between the two. They believed there was an intellectual peak, and that David Hauser accidentally crossed it. I believed them too. I believed them because I was young, extremely naïve, and susceptible to suggestion, especially when it came from adults who knew David Hauser, and his story, far better than I did. The problem for me, decades later when I reevaluated this situation in an article, was that these adults was that they were alcoholics.

“I work hard, and I play hard,” they would say when someone would confront them about their drinking. They did work hard, no one doubted that. When they would go into the details of what they did in a day, we would cringe. As for the playing, I didn’t see much of that. I saw them sit in their chair, and they all had their chair, drinking high-octane alcohol at their favorite watering hole, The Family Liquor Store. Then they’d drink impressive amounts of that high-octane fuel to fuel the stories they all told about one another, and when I write impressive, I’m talking from the perspective of a teenager who considered a tolerance for alcohol impressive.

The article that I wrote nearly a decade ago, A Simplicity Trapped in a Complex Mind, poked fun at how naïve I was to believe so many of the wild stories these people would tell. I also poked fun at their “intellectual peak” theory, in that article, and how it pertained to David Hauser. Now, after all this time, decades after my days in The Family Liquor Store, and nearly a decade after mocking myself for being so naïve as to believe them, I’m going to attempt to execute a very difficult and rather painful 360-degree flip on this matter for your reading pleasure. I’m going to admit that those raging alcoholics, who probably killed a warehouse full of brain cells downing their drink of choice, were almost 100% correct all along.    

Before doing so, I’d like to break down the fourth wall that stands between us, look out at you and ask, doesn’t this idea that there is an intellectual peak, a maximum capacity of knowledge, or some kind of line of demarcation, a “Here, there be Dragons” spot on the mental map of the prefrontal cortex that we dare not cross, seem like something Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm would write up? It did to me when I wrote that article on it nearly a decade ago.

I didn’t question them at the time, as I said, because for all the damage they did to their brain with the daily dose of the deadly, they were worldly types who had so many more experiences in life than I had. I think all I said was, “What?” with a scrunched-up face.

“All I can tell you is he had the most brilliant brain anyone who knew him had ever encountered one day, and he was talking to imaginary friends in the corner of our friendly, Family Liquor Store the next, just like that!” they said. “From what I heard, it was almost that immediate.” 

As naïve as I was, I couldn’t shake my skepticism entirely. As much as I liked being around these patrons, they were basically the losers of life, and their goal in life was to try to find some way to even the scales with those who succeeded. “Hey, you want to read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or any of the Russian authors, be my guest,” they basically said. “All I can say is be careful, because I knew this guy named David Hauser who got so smart he went nuts, like that! I’m not going to tempt fate like that. If you want to do it, go ahead, fart around and find out.” 

They didn’t say that exactly, but they did warn me about “Trying to get so smart.” These warnings, just on the face of it, sounded like something a Will Farrell dumb guy character might say to someone everyone considered smart. Yet, modern neurologists now suggest there might be a thread between genius and madness. They say a mind diving too deep into truth could slip over the edge. It’s not only possible, they suggest, it’s plausible. 

To be fair to the drunks, they spoke to David Hauser’s ex-wife, when she occasionally came down to The Family Liquor Store to “drag my deadbeat ex-husband out of the store,” and they said she told them “Everything there was to know” about her ex-husband. To be fair to me when I wrote that article, I was questioning why I ever believed the secondhand information from a bunch of alcoholics, whose primary source was an embittered ex-wife. Plus, we were all regular joes who had no medical background, or any other level of expertise to back up what we were discussing. The fact that they were daily drinkers of hard liquor suggests that not only had they already killed off so many brain cells that their assessment of the situation was clouded, but that their fears of contracting some sort of mental illness were probably a little more familiar to them. As the writers at Mental Health Foundation suggest, “Alcohol problems and mental ill health are closely linked.” 

We know that we’re just as susceptible to some form of mental illness as David Hauser. We know that hitting our head just wrong in an accident, or having the wrong genes can lead to some form of mental illness, but can a beautiful mind, a genius, who pushes himself so hard that he crosses some imaginary line, ostensibly called an intellectual peak, fracture “just like that!” and fall to madness? To illustrate this theory, let’s switch the frame to the physical. Is it possible for a pole-vaulter to get injured while trying a jump heretofore considered beyond his capacity. Of course, we can all understand that. Why is it so difficult to imagine the same thing could happen to a man who overtaxes his prefrontal cortex to the point that he gets stuck in overdrive. It’s different but similar, but it’s so hard to wrap our minds around. Observers, familiar with Einstein, claimed he lost his sense of time when obsessing over one of his theories, and those familiar with Newton claim he was known to forget to eat. Would we search medical journals to come up with an apt description of that behavior, or would we just call it tunnel vision? Whatever we call it, we get the image of a piano wire that is tuned too tight, until it snaps “just like that.”

Here’s where we complete the painfully embarrassing 360-degree flip. Those raging alcoholics who “played too hard,” from the comfort of their chair, espousing nonsense about an“intellectual peak,” they were more correct than they probably even knew, and science backs them up. Some now theorize that the genius of John Nash, that led to creative and intellectual breakthroughs, could’ve led to a dopamine overload that could’ve tied into a heightened dopamine sensitive that resulted in a case of schizophrenia. Leonardo da Vinci chased brilliance in hypnagogia, flirting with sleep deprivation’s dark side. Ada Lovelace wrestled numbers and despair in equal measure. We can find examples of anything, anywhere in history, to prove a point, but how anecdotal are they? If we dug deeper, would we find more examples of less heralded minds slipping over the edge? Are these examples of a phenomenon that awaits us all if we dig too deep, or are they evidence of how different each individual mind is? We all have different strengths and vulnerabilities, and some minds might just more susceptible to brief flashes of brilliance followed by a flame out. Perhaps, the examples of this phenomenon suggest that, if nothing else, we might never fully understand the full extents of the complexities of the human brain in our lifetime.

We all envision these geniuses as superheroes, and their insight that reshaped our world as superpowers, but their thoughts, like ours, are tethered to very human brains with all the same frailties, vulnerabilities, and breaking points. Is it possible, or even plausible, that that which fuels extraordinary cognition (intense focus, pattern recognition, relentless curiosity) could also push these geniuses toward collapse. By weaving together cutting-edge neuroscience and the raw, personal stories of brilliant minds, do we uncover a paradox that suggests that the brighter the flame is the faster it could flicker out?

It just seemed so irrational to me, when, nearly a decade ago, I wrote that article that scoffed at the drunken tales of direct links between David Hauser, his intellectual peak, and his roller coaster-like crash into the depths of mental illness. It still seems like dumb people knowledge that we often share at bars to say, “See, see, they’re really not that much better than us. They’re human after all.” After gaining even further distance to comment on me, commenting on me, I will now complete my 360-degree flip with the admission that I probably never should’ve questioned the drunks and their drunken analysis. They were almost 100% right, all along. I’m still not sure what I learned, unlearned, or relearned, but I think I now know enough to know what I don’t know, even though I really don’t know what that means. The one thing I have learned, after chasing the idea of how chasing an idea can lead to madness is that chasing an idea can lead to madness. So, maybe I’ve inadvertently answered my question after all.

Tesla’s Pigeon

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“I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.” –Nikola Tesla.

I’ll go ahead and leave the discussion of whether Nikola Tesla is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) or a GOAT to those with far more knowledge on the subject, but if any individual embodied the spirit of a domesticated bezoar ibex, descending from the Zagros and Taurus mountains to join humanity’s ranks, it would be Nikola Tesla.

Some skeptics dismiss the reverence for Tesla, saying, “I wouldn’t call him the GOAT.” Their argument? “He was first, I’ll give you that. He discovered how to harness alternating current, enabled wireless communication, pioneered remote control, and achieved countless other feats that revolutionized humanity, but,” and here’s where they make their c’mon! faces, “don’t you think someone else would have come up with all of that eventually?”

This is where we’re at, apparently. We’ve grown so accustomed to enjoying the fruits of genius that we downplay the achievements themselves. In today’s world, the process of celebrating greatness often involves systematically dismantling it. We begin by humanizing our icons—making their lives relatable and their quirks amusing—to draw in readers. We peel back the layers of their accomplishments, not to marvel at them but to suggest that anyone else, given the chance, might have done the same. We present witty but reductive “but-did-you-knows” about their flaws, as though to bridge the gap between their brilliance and our everyday mediocrity.

We build them up just to tear them down, all to feel better about ourselves.

“See, Henrietta Bormine, my wife? That Tesla guy wasn’t so great. He had outdated ideas about [insert pet issue here]. I could have achieved what he did—anyone could’ve, really, if they put in the effort.”

This is what we do now.

The thing about these “Anyone could’ve done it” arguments is that they’re almost impossible to defeat. Perhaps, with the same dedication—those mythical 10,000 hours—someone could have achieved what Tesla, Einstein, or da Vinci did. Most discoveries, inventions, and breakthroughs lose their superhuman qualities over time. Who invented the television set? “Someone would have eventually.” Who invented the microwave? “Was there an inventor?” Who invented the toaster. “Boring.” The next question is if anyone could’ve invented these things why didn’t they? Another factor that makes these arguments almost impossible to defeat is the idea that we cannot remove the geniuses from the timeline to test their theory.

This debate also leads me to the question I have when anyone drops a GOAT on someone spectacular, what separated the genius from their competition? Was a man like Nikola Tesla simply a right time, right place type of guy? How many people, in his era, were racing to explore the lengths of man’s ability to harness and manipulate electricity for human needs and eventual usage?

When we were kids, we thought Benjamin Franklin invented electricity. I don’t know how we twisted that story in such a manner, but it wasn’t long before a representative from the nerdy brainiacs set up straight. “Think about how foolish that sounds … How does a person invent electricity? He just advanced the idea that it could be harnessed, and some even debate that notion. They suggest that numerous others were conducting similar experiments. think there were a number of people messing around with experiments and displays of harnessing electricity, but Franklin was just the most famous person to put his name to such theories, and his fame and notoriety put all of those long-standing theories on the map.”

Tesla’s name belongs on the timeline of scientific advancements in electricity, but his achievements don’t stand in isolation. His legacy is interwoven with the work of predecessors, peers, and successors whose names are far less known. And here’s the ultimate question: How many “relatively anonymous figures” from history accomplished even a fraction of what Tesla did? For the sake of argument, let’s call this unsung hero “Todd Callahan,” because it feels like the quintessential everyman name for such musings.

This fictional Todd Callahan grew up much like Nikola Tesla—a curious science enthusiast who stood out as the smartest person anyone in his area had ever known. They dubbed Todd an “uncommon genius.” While other kids spent their afternoons throwing balls in open fields, Todd was tinkering with stuff. When other boys his age played with the toys, Tesla and Todd tore theirs apart. They enjoyed destroying stuff as much as every other young boy, but this wasn’t destruction for distruction’s sake. They did it to rebuild the toys, and they destroyed these toys and rebuilt them so often that they developed an understanding for mechanics in a way that set them on the path to innovate and manipulate the natural world.

Todd’s brilliance was evident early, earning him both admiration and envy from those around him. His neighbors marveled at his genius, and perhaps some resented it. Even the tenured professor, who encountered hundreds of bright students every year and would’ve scoffed at GOAT-like superlatives, privately admitted to his colleagues that Todd Callahan was special.

How many Todd Callahans existed during Tesla’s time, and what distinguished them from each other? Was Tesla, as an adult, more daring, more imaginative, or simply more willing to embrace failure and learn from it? We could say D) all of the above, but the most vital factors in Tesla’s journey to success might have been the simplest of all: hard work, patience, and time.

Time, above all, may have been the decisive factor separating Nikola Tesla from the Todd Callahans of history. Tesla devoted his life—every ounce of energy, thought, and purpose—to science. While this now feels like a cliché description we could apply to many “almost Teslas” of history, it’s worth considering its weight. Imagine mentioning at a party, “Nikola Tesla devoted all of his energy, his time, and his thoughts to science.” The likely response? A collective yawn or polite indifference. It’s not the kind of revelation that stuns a crowd—it’s too broad, too general to feel significant.

But for Tesla, it wasn’t just a statement; it was a truth that defined his life. As Petar Ivic wrote, “Tesla’s only love, inseparable and sincere, was science.”

We probably have to add terms like ‘inseparable’ and ‘sincere’ to capture attention, because every major figure in history devoted themselves to something. The modern adjective we drop on someone so devoted to the particulars of their craft is gym rat. Judging by descriptions of Nikola Tesla’s physique, he never spent time in a gym, but the analogy holds true when we learn that he spent so much of his free time in life in labs and various other enclosed rooms that skin cancer was probably never one of Tesla’s concerns.

Even suggesting that Tesla probably spent a majority of his life in small rooms, testing various ideas and experiments probably doesn’t move the needle much, but the difference between Nikola Tesla and the various Todd Callahans of human history is that Todd Callahan was a normal man driven by normal needs, and normal wants and desires. Todd wanted to achieve as much as Tesla did in the fields of science, but as some point, the man wanted to go home. He sacrificed a lot in the name of science, but he loved to fish and hunt on weekends, and he loved playing card games with the fellas. Todd was a normal man who loved science, but he also loved women. He dated a variety of women, until he found his true love, and they settled down to have a family, a dog named Scruffy, and a white picket fence to keep Scruffy and the kids from harm.

Tesla refrained from these normal pursuits in life, fearing that they would take away, or diminish, his pursuit of steadily advancing the science of electricity. We could say that Nikola Tesla refrained from pursuing a sense of human wholeness, or a sense of completion, but we could also say that was his edge.

“I do not believe an inventor should marry,” Tesla said. “A married man is precluded from devoting himself to his work. Therefore, I have chosen to remain unmarried and to pursue my work.” Tesla believed celibacy allowed him to maintain acute focus and channel his energy entirely on his inventions, and as opposed to most science nerds, Nikola Tesla did, in fact, have list of women who were all but beating down his door.

Nikola and His Pigeons

Nikola Tesla took the “hard work, patience and time” devotion to his craft so seriously that he tried as hard as he could to void his life of distractions, physical and otherwise. The only vice, it appears he had, was an utter devotion to pigeons. He could spend hours at a time feeding them at the park. In his pursuit of fowl friendship, he occasionally encountered an injured one. When that happened, he brought them back to his hotel room to nurse them back to health. He was known to leave his hotel room window open to allow pigeons full access to his room whenever they needed. He also had a habit of asking the chef of the hotel to prepare a special mix of seeds for his pigeons to, we can only guess, gain him an unfair advantage among those seeking friendship and more from the pigeon population.

The one thing that those of us who know little about birds, and nothing of pigeons, know is that birds are not what we’d call discriminating when it comes to where they decide to relieve themselves. Bird enthusiasts suggest it is “difficult but possible to potty train a bird,” but there are no indications that Nikola Tesla, a germaphobe before being a germaphobe was cool, spent any of his precious time on Earth devoted to that cause. Thus, we can only guess that Tesla’s hotel room wouldn’t make it in a Better Homes and Garden feature article, and we have to imagine that if that list of potential suitors, mentioned above, got one look, or whiff, of his hotel room it might diminish his demand. The historical record suggests that this was also one of the reasons why some of the hotels he lived in gave him the boot.

Nikola Tesla was willing to sacrifice all of that for an afternoon spent in the company of his favorite beings on the planet, and in the midst of all that, Nikola Tesla found true love for the first time in his life. As with any person who surrounds themselves with people, places and things, we eventually whittle them down to a focus of our attention and love. Tesla found that in one of the pigeons who regularly kept company with him, a white pigeon with some grey highlights. He declared that this pigeon would find him, no matter where he was, and spend time around him. Eventually, as with all pigeons, this one fell to an illness. Tesla took her back to his room and tried to cure her illness, but this man of miracles, could not save his one true love in life. It broke his heart, as it breaks all of our hearts when a beloved pet dies, but Tesla was so broken hearted that some suggest he experienced such a feeling of hopelessness, and such a general sense of purposeless, that he died days later of a broken heart. We’ve all heard tales of an individual who dies shortly after their spouse, and that appears to be what happened here, with Tesla and his beloved pigeon.

Before he died, Tesla informed others that his beloved pigeon visited him on the day of her demise, and “a white light shone from her eyes, brighter that anything I’ve generated with electrical machinery.” Shortly after her death, Tesla told friends that his life’s work was finished.

This story is used by some outlets to diminish Nikola Tesla, and the Tesla quote they use is that he loved a “pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me.” The intent is to suggest he was such a wacky scientist that couldn’t properly manage human relations, so he devoted his passion to this rat with wings. It’s funny on the face of it, but how many of us “love” a dog so completely that when the little fella gets run over by a car, we’re broken hearted? As Jules, from Pulp Fiction would argue, “But, dog’s got personality, [and] personality goes a long way.” It’s true, but when they die, we cry and make damn fools out of ourselves in a way that those who witness it will never forget or forgive. “I’m sorry, but it’s a dumb dog,” they say with derision. How many have the same passionate love for a cat, who in many ways fails to return love in the demonstrable ways a dog can. Some love a pig, a rat, and a snake in much the same way, even though we can’t understand how anyone could develop a quid pro quo relationship with such animals.

Is it a little quirky any time a grown man develops such passionate feelings for a bird, but this happened late in Tesla’s life when we can only imagine he lost much of his drive, passion, and that almost unquenchable thirst for accomplishment was probably quenched, and that probably created a void in which he began to focus on how lonely he was in life. Some part of him may have also regretted not seeking human companionship more in life, but he may have felt that he waited too long, and that the time for all that had long-since past. As such, he may have sought an unconditional friendship that allowed these pigeons to become repositories for his love. Anyone who has read about Nikola Tesla knows he was a passionate man, and when he reached a point where he felt he accomplished everything he wanted to in life, he looked for more tangible ways to express his sense of love. I doubt Nikola Tesla went to the park bench, looking for the type of love only a pigeon can provide. I’m sure it just happened, and we can’t control who we fall in love with.