The Tim Tebow Chronicles, by Jon Bois

This is not exactly a book, but it was long and I spent a lot of time reading it so I'm throwing it in here. (Can read it online here)

Overall I thought this was an interesting experiment but that it did not earn its read-time for me; it felt long to read, and to me its thesis is basically summarised by this bit in the middle:

I always felt like I kind of related to Todd. He played football all his life, he had been there and done that. And now, he was just hanging around for no reason. The difference between us is that, you know, I eventually found a team that could use me. He just didn't.

Nothing will make you lonelier than not having purpose. Purpose is like gravity. All the friends and fans and everything? Without purpose, they're just floating there, the universe is like a big soup.

Basically, Bois is ambling towards a kind of David Chapman-esque philosophy: the games we play have meaning even though we create meaning ourselves. See also:

There is no one to cheer us on in these final days. When we score our touchdown, there will be no scorekeeper. No one will see us score the grandest goal in the history of sports.  

Volquez: But I guess this game isn't really about that, is it?

Tebow: I guess not.

Volquez: We're players, but we're also spectators to all this wonder. The cities, the valleys, the ancient crater. And these mountains. They're gorgeous.

And also:

You know, when I was younger, a lot of academics back home used to turn up their noses at sports. They were lowbrow wastes of time, they said. People were too obsessed with them. The unmissable insinuation being, of course, that they themselves were up to something more important.

We are small. We are nothing. We are such nothing that the universe does not acknowledge that we are even here, and it never will. Accept that. And now, stand on this line, and look at that quarterback, and drill the fuck out of him. Nothing you do will be more important, because nothing you do will be important.

It is quite well that we love sports. Because one day, sports will be the only adventures we have left. There will be nothing else to do, and for eternity.

Humans cannot endure in a future without problems. It's not in us. Sports invent problems as nothing else can.

My issue philosophically with The Tim Tebow Chronicles is (incidentally) the issue I had with the TV show The Good Place: they want to make claims about a world with no external arbiters, where meaning is meaningful even though it doesn't have any truly objective grounding. (Cf David Chapman again, who is trying to make this work in Meaningness, which I admire but also find very hard to read).

This is incredibly hard to do to anyone's satisfaction! So both Bois and the Good Place writers pull a kind of bait-and-switch, subbing in a series of external arbiters and escalating authority figures who can give the characters their Gold Stars For Being Good. This is exactly the problem though, there is no external authority who can give you that gold star!

I am bothered by this bait-and-switch, and hope I'm misunderstanding both authors, but... if I'm misunderstanding them, I don't understand what I'm not understanding, etc.