"Get a Real Job" (Youth Sports Edition)

My kids are 17 and 14. They've played soccer, baseball, football, basketball, and more. I thought I'd heard it all. But yelling "GET A REAL JOB!" to an umpire was a new one to me. It was so absurd my friend and I found it comical. The umpire didn't take the bait. This was over balls and strikes, I think. Who knows. This was a very low-stakes baseball game, I really couldn't find any meaning in it. Basically kids getting reps on a nice October day. Kick off your high-heeled sneakers, it's party time. That's a Steely Dan reference. Seriously, though, I'm there to chill. When you live in Western New York and your kid is playing baseball in October, life is good. My buddy was in town and we were taking in the game when a parent from the other team started getting into the ump and hollered at him to get a real job. So confused. These umps take way too much abuse. Of course they get calls wrong. They're human. Keep the human element in the game, you know? As mentioned, the umpire didn't escalate the situation, to his credit. And life went on. My buddy doesn't have kids so he isn't familiar with the youth sports scene. Here he got a glimpse of what it looks like at times. 

Soon after this happened, I went to my kid's football game. I'm always early. I saw the referees chatting up each other in the parking lot before the game. I approached them and told them the story about the baseball umpire, and told them I appreciate what they do. One of the refs summed it up pretty good: "They yell at us to not blow the whistle and to let the kids play. And they yell at us when we don't make a call." These officials can't win. 

I'm in Generation X. Remember when we used to say "take a chill pill"? Never a bad piece of advice. Take a chill pill. 

TikTok Brain Rot?

As I gear up to teach a summer course on the Sociology of TikTok, I'm thinking about questions to ask students to characterize TikTok and describe how and why they use it. I'm reminded of something a student said in a different course when we talked about TikTok and social media use. The student, Luke, looked up during the conversation and said: "Brain rot." It stuck with me. 

Fun fact: Brain rot was the Oxford word of the year in 2024, defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging”. 

An article on Yahoo notes: "The term comes from the idea that the internet is “rotting” the brains of frequent users who are “extremely online” or “chronically online,” leading them to reference memes and slang terms that aren’t typically used offline — and they're doing it a lot."

Interesting. I don't know if my brain is rotting, or if it already rotted from many decades of watching television. As a Gen X person who uses TikTok, maybe I'm a couch potato with brain rot. I will admit that my hand hurts from holding my phone too much. I check too many things too much of the time: email, social media, the news. The phone makes it so easy. Earlier this morning I did yoga. I go to the gym 2-3 times a week. I go on 45-minute walks with my wife. I have a job. But I still have many hours in the day to look at things on my phone. I look at recipes. I watch sports highlights. I see videos of people playing Van Halen guitar riffs. Recently footage of 70-year-old David Lee Roth in tight pants kind of singing Van Halen songs made it onto my feed. It's fine. I like short form videos as part of my information and entertainment mix. TikTok knows I like baseball, so I see MLB highlights. Once in a while the song from This Week in Baseball shows up for me (it makes me happy). I like to keep up with things...I learn Gen Z slang from my Gen Z kids but also from TikTok. When I began hearing the name Mel Robbins I was easily able to find out who that is from TikTok. It's byte size information, pretty easily digestible. I also consume some of my news on TikTok and watch videos about politics. And TikTok knows I'm interested in a variety of social issues, so I'm presented with informative videos like this one about gender, politics, and marriage and this one with data points about life satisfaction and age. If I want my students to think about child labor laws in the present, then TikTok is a pretty good place to start. If I want students to consider arguments in favor of banning TikTok, then TikTok offers one way to do so. Ultimately, I'm pro TikTok. I appreciate its availability for a range of serious, semi-serious, and unserious purposes. Not the first such platform, and not the last. 

One more thought: I think last year I read more books than in any other year of my adulthood. Is reading books a countervailing force to social media brain rot?