The Ecstasy of Existence

The big news for the past week is Liverpool finally winning the English Premier League after a wait of 30 years. Being a die-hard supporter of Liverpool ever since my teenager days playing soccer barefoot in the park, I felt both extreme relief and elation. Finally, after all those years of heartbreak, we are finally there.

Sometimes I feel that sports as an industry is there because we have a deep psychological need for it. We want to feel that we belong to a larger group. By supporting a team like Manchester United or Liverpool, we feel that we belong to a family of kindred souls. We share and suffer together and that gives us to right to both criticize and praise the performance of our team.

I always feel miserable whenever Liverpool loses (thankfully, those occasions are quite rare nowadays). It is like a kind of self-imposed suffering. You alternate between despair and ecstasy, depending on the fortune of the team. The joy of winning is immense because of the pain you have willingly endured in sticking with your favorite team through thick and thin. When we win a huge tournament like the UEFA Champions League or the English Premier League title, the happiness is out of this world. It is a kind of ecstatic joy that you never get to feel in your ordinary humdrum existence. And maybe that's why football is so important to the masses. It gives us the highs and lows of human emotions, in the safety of our couches at home.

We are all adrenaline junkies. The entertainment and gaming industries know that and thrive on giving us those huge fixes. Cheering crazy over your favorite English football team, who have no direct connection with you, seems like a foolish thing to do, but it provides supporters with a sense of identity, which is another deep psychological need. It gives them a license go wild and behave like hooligans, albeit for a short duration during the match.

Mr Spock of Star Trek would certainly find the antics of football supporters strange. Why would the outcome of a match involving 22 players chasing a ball evoke such extremes of emotion and trigger such loud behaviour? 40,000 people packed in a stadium, screaming madly over the seemingly useless physical labour of 22 men over 90 minutes. Strange species indeed!

Strange, but that's who we are. Proud as we are of our capacity to reason, deep down inside we are but creatures of emotions. Everything we do is mostly driven by the turbulence of our hormones and neurotransmitters. Ignoring this dimension of human existence is to obliterate life itself.

So let's continue doing this every year. Repeat this senseless ritual of winning and losing. Sink to the deepest of despair or rise to the heights of ecstasy at each iteration. Life and existence demands it.