Useless Analogies

Talking about fantasy sports is like showing off your vacation photos. No one really cares what you have to say and in the end we just wanted to know that you had a good time. A lot of people play fantasy, and even more have to hear about someone talking about it. Do the listeners really want to hear it? Not at all.

I was discussing with someone if there was a better analogy than that. He immediately came up with "it's like adding links to the side of your blog." We never click the links on someone else's site but are nonetheless compelled to list them on our own. To a greater extent, these posts are the same, blindly submitted with the hope that from them someone will draw substance. The visitor count may increase, but is anyone really reading?

I began to wonder, what other things do we invest time into, only to see very little, if any return at all? These internet based distractions like instant messaging, blogging, facebooking, etc come to mind. But extended to bricks and mortars, what about hitting the driving range, gardening, even going out drinking. Yes the former increases a your sense of social nexus, and the latter improves some physical sense of the world. Beyond that, we're doing "stuff" to occupy our time, to think we that we are bettering ourselves as human beings. Okay, drinking doesnt better ourselves, but how does staying in, reading an autobiography of an ex-prez, better ourselves? All things balanced, your witty barroom banter with some bubbily coed might be more fruitful than chapters upon chapters of a boy named Ronald wooing a girl named Nancy. Plus it might be more fun.

But surely we aren't simple hedonists devolving into piles of nonsensical pleasure. Maybe I'm asking the wrong question here. Terms like "good" and "better" describing our actions are about as meaningful as "crisp" and "flavor halflifes" describing beer. So beyond that 9to5er what do we do that is really substantive? And substantive as in not bettering ourselves but bettering others. Coaching, teaching, volunteering, working with kids, reading to the elderly, giving time to something besides reading, vacationing, golfing, workshopping, me my and myselfing.

Maybe our invested time shouldn't only return the few anecdotes we drop off at our next social gathering either.