In Defense of Leisure, or Why Fantasy Football is Good
It's OK to do things simply because they are fun. There are real psychological benefits.
Fantasy football is for sure good, even if this team I just drafted isn’t. Let me know what you think (about my team, or otherwise) in the comments.
Almost every year, there’s a new take about why fantasy football is bad. Fantasy football and its obsession with statistics is bad for real football. Fantasy football is addicting and can ruin relationships and even lives. Some efficiency lords will tell you they only engage in activities dedicated to personal growth. Easily the most volcanic take is that fantasy football is a waste of time that is siphoning profit from employers.
I’m here to tell you that fantasy football, for lack of a better term, is good.
I love football and I love fantasy football. I had my first fantasy draft of the year today, and so I’ve been asking myself: Why, exactly, do fantasy sports—specifically football—make me so happy? And perhaps more importantly, why do a lot of people think that’s weird?
The more I thought about it, the more I viewed fantasy football as a prism for understanding how cultural contexts assign value to activities. We are all the result of an infinite number of events and influences that, combined with our genetic predispositions, form our value systems and make us who we are. For example, in a market economy such as ours, what we do with our time is valued not in how much happiness or well-being it creates, but its economic value. Many jobs contribute very little to society, but are valuable in the market. Others contribute a ton to society, but are valued less. We don’t really need Wall Street, but we do need nurses, for example. Similarly, nobody is born believing that working 40 hours a week is a very good thing or a very bad thing. That is learned, and a function of our economic system which helps shape cultural values.
Something can only be a “waste of time” if it doesn’t work toward something you value, and values, as I said, are largely cultural. In the study I linked to above, for example, fantasy sports are a waste of time because it assumes fantasy players' motivation is a return on their financial investment, and more often than not, they lose. So it’s a waste of time because it doesn’t generate money.
Of course, there are some fantasy GMs out there who are only in it for the money, but I think that broad assessment severely misses the mark. Fantasy sports provide other returns on your time, like a sense of community with your friends. Sure, it’s possible to go overboard with fantasy sports, just as it’s possible to go overboard with anything in life. There’s evidence that too much meditation can be bad for you.
While markets ascribe financial value to certain pursuits, there are other forms of value. If you value knowing a lot about fiction, it’s not a waste of time to read fiction, but in a market sense, it’s a waste of time unless you get paid to read. Nobody would argue that exercising or eating healthy has no value. There’s also value in activities that satisfy our basic psychological needs, and there’s a plethora of psychological benefits that come with fantasy football. Basic Psychological Needs Theory is one of the six sub-theories of Self-Determination Theory, an evidence-based theory of motivation, development and wellness. BPNT holds that:
There are three basic psychological needs the satisfaction of which is essential to optimum development, integrity, and well-being. These are the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Failure to satisfy any one of these needs will be manifested in diminish growth, integrity and wellness. In addition, need frustration, typically due to thwarting of basic needs, is associated with greater ill being and more impoverished functioning.
Now, in my view, a perfectly ordered society would aim to align “what we do for a living” with the things we are passionate about and the things we find inherently satisfying1. Some people are fortunate in that, if they could be doing anything in the world, they’d still choose the job they currently have. But obviously this isn’t the case for everyone.
While I’m not aware of Self-Determination Theory research specifically on fantasy sports2, there’s loads of research on playing sports and also, interestingly, video games. I find video games to be a compelling parallel. The ability to create customized worlds and characters has been shown to support feelings of autonomy. Think about games like The Sims, or simply building your own character in something like World of Warcraft. This is not unlike building and drafting your own team in fantasy sports.
Competence is probably the most easily recognizable benefit of video games, and the base of their attraction. The attraction of games since Pong has been the satisfaction that comes from applying and then mastering skills. As French philosopher, writer, lawyer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre once said, “It is one of man’s curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties solely for the pleasure of resolving them.” Video games, and fantasy sports, are essentially intricate difficulties we create for ourselves because resolving them feels good.
Finally, relatedness. Fantasy sports are a way to connect with other people and to stay in touch with friends. The number one reason cited by adults for why they play casual games is to connect with others.
The satisfaction and support of these basic psychological needs leads to increased motivation. In other words, it’s why things are fun. Fantasy football becomes a lot less fun when your team sucks. Video games aren’t as enjoyable if you are terrible. And almost nothing is fun if you do it solely because someone tells you that you have to.
We also have a fetish for work in Western society. There are many essays on the rise of hustle culture you can read as a sort of primer. There’s a tendency to view hobbies and things that are simply fun with skepticism, like they are second-class activities, subordinate to money-making work. It makes us uncomfortable to not be working. We collectively forget that the point of “work” is to create an equitable distribution of resources among society so that we can then enjoy our lives. As I said above, it would be ideal if work was also aligned more with our passions so that jobs would also support our basic psychological needs, but in many instances that isn’t the case, or even a consideration. It’s not that people don’t want to be productive or that they don’t want to contribute meaningfully to society. It’s just that we conflate careers and jobs with being productive and contributing to society. They aren’t necessarily the same thing. Some people are fortunate that what they want to be doing is a skill that can be monetized, but many are not. And again, the idea we have to spend some arbitrarily determined amount of time working is simply a man-made construct, and while there’s no way for many people to get out of working a standard work week, it’s important to keep in mind there’s no inherent human virtue in doing so, or going above and beyond3.
Anthropology is helpful in illustrating how cultural the importance of “work” is and how it relates to the perceived affluence of a society. A small number of what we’d call hunter-gatherer societies, which anthropologists categorize as “band-level” societies, still exist in the world. Band-level societies are nomadic, generally contain about 30-50 people and have no real institutionalized government.
The Dobe Ju/’hoansi4 are one such band-level society who make their home in southwest Africa and have often been portrayed as among the most impoverished people on earth (an assessment which at best can be viewed as a bias and at worst, flat out racism). However, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins5 has argued that depending on how you conceive of affluence, they might be among the most affluent people on earth. In his essay The Original Affluent Society, exposes the myth that band-level societies spent all their time foraging. In fact, the Dobe work about 15 hours a week and food is “both varied and abundant” and that the time they “do not work in subsistence they pass in leisure or leisurely activity.” Band-level societies are highly egalitarian and only in extreme circumstances does anyone go hungry.
I would pause here to point out that the United States of America leads the world in both fantasy sports and gross domestic product and yet, according to the non-profit organization Feeding America, 1 in 9 Americans face food insecurity and 1 in 7 children face food insecurity. That’s over 32 million people—over 11 million of which are children.
And to be absolutely clear, I’m not saying that the Dobe Ju/’hoansi live in Utopia and have it all figured out, just that values are cultural and those values include how work is viewed.
The point being, there’s nothing magical about working 40 hours a week, or the value we place on working, making money, and accumulating stuff. Famously, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that as productivity increased, we’d all work less. He thought his grandkids would have 15-hour work weeks. This, of course, has not become the norm6, even though productivity has skyrocketed. Instead, workers produce more and make less, as illustrated in this graph from the Economic Policy Institute.
Fantasy sports are an avenue for people to support their basic psychological needs, which leads to increased wellness. Can it be taken too far? Of course, just like any activity it can become addictive and detrimental to well-being. But, the bottom line is fantasy sports are fun—unless you draft David Johnson first overall and he gets hurt on the first play of the season. Most of us need more leisure activities in our life, not fewer. And as people get older and start families, or move across the country, fantasy sports are a good way to keep in touch with people and derive that essential sense of community we all yearn for. I wrote this essay because I had fantasy football on the brain. But you can say the same of video games, painting, Dungeons & Dragons, poker, golf, and on and on and on. Do things that are fun and satisfying, as often as you can.
If you’ve been enjoying Rhapsody, it would mean the world to me if you’d consider telling your friends about it. I’m hoping the larger the community becomes, the more beneficial and interesting it will become for everyone. ~Joe
Yes, there are things that must be done that nobody finds “inherently satisfying.” However, when it’s clear that something has to be done to benefit the greater good, when people feel appreciated for doing that something, and when they have a relative degree of autonomy as to when and how an objective is achieved, it can still be rewarding. But this is an entire essay for another day.
If you know of any, let me know!
As I wrote in my last piece: Happiness doesn’t scale with affluence, and it doesn’t scale with achievement.
The styling of the name “Dobe Ju/’hoansi” may look unusual to many readers. That’s because they have a click language. Where the “/” appears, a speaker would make clicking sound with their tongue. Here’s an example of the language being spoken.
Just to expand on this point a bit, Sahlins writes: “There are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way—based on the concept of market economies—states that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although they can be improved. Thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that ‘urgent goods’ become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters.”
This is the subject of anthropologist David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs, which argues that as society has grown more productive, it’s created meaningless jobs that harm overall well-being.