Navel-Gazing

People go on about football, baseball, and soccer being America's favorite pastime. I've always been a hold-out for Hockey myself...I can't say that I really know anything about the sport, but I enjoy watching it when it's on and saying I like hockey keeps people from thinking that I'm completely bizarre. The thing is, I know a lot of people like me who only have a tenuous appreciation for professional sports. I know many more who deliberately look up the scores just so they can act like they are a casual fan. (This confession is always delivered with a lot of neck rubbing and ah-shucks-you-caught-me facial expressions.)

It's all some sort of bizarre social scam, I think, that everyone has to find a sport to line up behind...it's like declaring a tribal identity. Now you true sports fans out there, that's lovely, glad you enjoy watching grown people chase around balls, pucks, and birdies for millions of dollars a year, but that just can't be everyone's cup of tea, now can it?

I think we American's have a more universal national past-time: the art of navel-gazing.

Think about it. As a culture we spend an inordinate amount of time worried about how we compare to others, deciding there's a problem, and then trying blindly to fix it. It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't go half-cocked with incomplete information. Most Americans spend time in therapy or some sort of support group at some point during their lives. Quite a few of them end up on medications. (There's definitely a point where therapy and meds are necessary things, but I think we tend to over-apply it.) Self-reflection is a wonderful thing, but it seems like we can't engage in it without an audience.

Just look at all the blogs floating around out there (this one included of course). There are whole genres of navel gazing blogs out there: weight-loss blogs, spiritual quote blogs, mommy and me blogs, food photo blogs, and fitness blogs just to name a few. The art of the diary isn't gone, it's just gone public.

We love talking about ourselves and examining ourselves. I love usage stat pages, for instance. I look at my blog stats frequently. I just found Goodreads's reading stats pages. There are all kinds of nifty things in there. I've already read 5585 pages this year, for example. It also turns out that in the last three years or so since I started recording my reading consistently, I've read more Garth Nix books than any other author. They also have a nifty little scatter plot that charts publishing dates, which is cool. It doesn't matter and it doesn't mean anything, but I find this way more absorbing than the impending March Madness shenanigans coming up.