Why Do We Love Sports?
Imagine you've been living in the trenches for weeks, maybe months. Corpses of your allies, friends, brothers surround you. The smell of their rot, revolting; the pain of your loss, excruciating. Rain water has made the ground where you stand thick with mud. You're unbearably cold and will be that way for a long time. You're stuck living in a nightmare, hell on Earth. Joined by your enemies and allies, you're fighting in the most brutal war the world has ever seen: the Great War.
But you wake up one morning and everything is different. Today, you leave the trenches. You escape the smell of the rotten bodies. You drop rain-filled boots to run on the grass barefoot. You lay your guns down and pick up a ball. You stop shooting at your enemy and instead start shooting at their goal post. It's a Christmas miracle because today, you're not fighting; you're playing football, or soccer, with the people you're supposed to hate the most in the world.
When they say that sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, stories like these often come to mind. On December 25th, 1914, there was a temporary ceasefire during the Great War, and Allied soldiers from Britain played football with German soldiers instead of performing their sworn duty to fight. This moment is remarkable for many reasons, but what stands out to me is what the soldiers did on their Christmas Day: troops, they played sports.
And this isn't the first time enemies pause their fighting to play. The first known Olympic Games took place among warring city-states in Greece. The year was 776 BCE, and possibly nude athletes from all over Greece competed in dozens of events, many of which are still used in the modern Olympic Games. Citizens were brought together to revel in the spectacle of it all. Warring factions would take a break to watch athletes compete and would continue to do so for many centuries to come. Today, the Olympics still brings countries of the world together in the spirit of healthy competition, many of whom are not friendly with one another anywhere else.
Why do we love sports so much that we're willing to put aside even our most extreme differences to participate in them? Before you answer that, I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor for today: Every Plate, America's best value meal kit. Putting all my time into making these videos, I sometimes just don't have the time to cook a healthy meal. As a result, I've had to eat out or order fast food for most of my meals. But, as I'm sure you know, eating out can get quite expensive, and fast food is usually unhealthy. This is why I love Every Plate.
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Maybe it's because we want to feel the highs of winning without the fear of the consequences of losing. When the soldiers played against each other, they would get excited over the potential of winning, without worrying about what would happen to them if they didn't. Competition exists everywhere in nature; it's the survival of the fittest for most species, even humans.