what did you make of the bit in 17776 where they talk about the patch of manicured lawn that noone had stepped on for centuries? i could understand cultural fixation on sports for the reasons in the recent post, but i found a lot of the other cultural stagnation really depressing. in fact, football seemed much LESS stagnated than a lot of other things.
i was thinking about that bit exactly
i mean, the cultural stagnation is depressing from a certain point of view, but you can think about it like this: the story takes place in the distant future, but like all stories [citation needed], it's ABOUT the present.
i think the story is showing that the human characters in 17776 mostly haven't come to the realizations that the world is infinitely interesting and that everything in existence is meaningful because we can be fascinated with it. A lot of the characters are still really existentially tormented by the absence of a purpose or of "progress" to make. They are continuing their lives out of habit, using the values and frameworks they were brought up with.
but that realization is still out there waiting for them. the patch of lawn that had never been trodden upon for thousands of years is kind of a representation of that. you know how in some of the football games every tiny patch of ground is assigned increasingly precise levels of meaning? the football games in 17776 are a space in which the reality of existence is revealed. If we could look at the world around us with love we could realize that every inch of the earth's surface and every second of mundane existence is meaningful. someday someone will walk on that lawn that hasn't been touched in thousands of years and they will notice that they are somewhere with significance. That someone could be you
