The Buttons…They Do Nothing

The New York Times today ripped the band-aid off a long held secret.  The buttons that you push every day to help speed you along are nothing more than placebos, left in place to keep you docile while you wait for assorted boring parts of your day to go by.  We’ve been pushing buttons like assholes for years with nothing to show for it.

Elevators, crosswalks, and office thermostats are all fake.  As fake as a Josh Brown Apology.  As fake as Skip Bayless’ shtick.  As fake as, well, all of our names here.

So, let this be what brings you into the world we live in.  What you do doesn’t matter much.  For us, the football-obsessed, drunken, un-pants’d masses, that’s especially true.

Are you someone who legitimately thinks that where you sit changes your team’s luck on Sundays?  It doesn’t.  Stop it.  Your ass placement has nothing to do with the outcome of a game.

Do you think that obsessively changing your fantasy lineup based on your gut is going to help you succeed?  It really doesn’t.  It’s all guessing.  Nobody knows what’s going to happen.  Fantasy experts are just as dumb as we are.

None of us actually do anything to affect football.  Now, your delusions are ok as long as they don’t hurt anyone.  Feel free to wear your “lucky” jersey, or paint your face team colors, or sit in your favorite chair, even though it’s a horrible color and is uncomfortable, because your guy hit a field goal to win your league last year while you sat there.  Just know that you don’t actually change the outcome.

That’s really the operative phrase here, though.  WHILE YOU SAT THERE.  You I have, literally, no effect on the outcome of a sporting event.  We have the same effect on a movie or a book as we do on a sporting event.  You’re sitting on your couch, covered in bean dip and reeking of liquor, imagining that you are making the players perform due to your actions.

It’s all placebo buttons, guys.

We all need to feel important though, don’t we?  The star of our own little play.  Well, we aren’t.  To professional football and the assorted racists and morons running the league, and particularly the idiot at the top, we’re a renewable commodity, nothing more.

However, they market it as a sense of control.  That’s the whole magic of fantasy football.  If you do weekly or full season fantasy, you know the thrill that you get when you guess right, when you play the right players to win.  You also know the crushing feeling of losing, when you do something so boneheaded that you can’t believe it.  It’s still an illusion.  No matter whether you play those guys or not, they’ll still do exactly what they’re going to do.