England have just finished playing their first 5 day "Test" match against New Zealand. They lost very badly. Even though I was two seasons and 13 hours away from it, lying in a late-winter bed, the result mattered absurdly.
Listening to cricket being played on the other side of the world as I fall in and out of slumber becomes a lose-lose (in)activity as the eleven players my hopes depend upon fail miserably and my broken night is marked by fuzzy disappointment.
Other sad men will recognize the syndrome. Why does it matter to us? None of us is playing in the match. We don't know the players personally.
Is sports addiction "an extreme emotional cathexis" as this po-faced consultant claims ?
A "cathexis" is the concentration of emotional energy upon some object/idea/event. Coined , I believe, by that chancer Freud (who really abused the story-thing). The Freud-wallahs seem to use it in conjunction with "narcissistic" and "libidinal".
Sadly for the sport-addicts, neither applies here. My support for a team or a player lacks narcissism - which ,now I consider it, flattens out the experience even further - and it really isn't libidinal.
When your team fails you do feel you've made a bad investment. You've concentrated that emotional energy in the wrong place. Unfortunately you know you'll continue to invest. Nothing you can do about it.
The live uncertainly of the story - that's what hooks us, the voyeurs who feel as if we are participating . We can hope , hope hard .
And we know we'll get resolution. There's just no role for us in deciding what that resolution might be. We simply witness it in a heightened state . Then we end up with disappointment more often than not. Flat, grey, rather pointless, and entirely insignificant...
We need to work on this one.
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