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Comment by ajtaylor | Hacker News Reader

What's sad to me is to read that the writer is happy to have a permanently damaged knee in exchange for a few years of playing football. Personally I can't see how it would be worth it. I need to walk, run and cycle every day for the rest of my life. I don't need to play football.

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So you are sad that someone else is happy because what makes them happy isn't what makes you happy.

Well, sure. In the limit, I'd be sad if a large portion of humanity chose to use the experience machine [1]. More realistically, I'm sad that Americans spend so much time watching TV, even if it makes them happy.

I think I can at once support this guy's ability to make choices for himself and be saddened that our culture may have socialized him into making a tradeoff that I don't think was worthwhile, in some objective sense.

Perhaps the test I mean is, suppose football didn't exist and then you walked up to this guy in the present day, explained what football is, and then gave him the choice to relive his life starting from high school, but this time with football and all the (positive and negative) consequences he faced. It seems likely to me that he'd reject this out of hand.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine

I'm sad that people incur permanent, potentially life changing injuries from the game, not because I want to push my views on them.

In my experience, the actual sport I was playing was less important than those I played it with.

There's a lot more to it than just 'playing football'

I'm sure there is a lot more and it seems to me that most, if not all of that can probably be obtained/experienced without the violent hits that are at the heart of many of these controversies.

The sad truth is they are the modern gladiator and we are the spectator lusting for the violence. Why else would someone be able to make such incredible amounts of money to throw a ball around?

> Why else would someone be able to make such incredible amounts of money to throw a ball around?

To be fair, there are lots of sports with crazy high salaries. And some of those (baseball, soccer) have hardly any violence at all in comparison to football, hockey, and maybe even basketball.

I can relate to the author though, I played five different sports throughout high school and football was just plain different. It definitely felt like battle when you went out there, fighting for your school/city against the 'enemy'.

Depends on the culture at your school/city though I suppose

I'll ask you the (serious) question then: if the cost of the experience of playing with those people was a permanently injured knee would you still say it was worth it?

I get that sports are about relationships as much as the game, but I don't understand how the potential trade offs are worth it in the big picture. This is not me trying to push my views on anyone - I'm simply curious.

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