The Way Things Should Be
"He really changed the game."
As someone who rarely understands or tracks sports, my mind wants to think that the "he" in this statement has made some radical adjustment to however the game was played before; maybe he added in the component of knives, or flaming hoops, or injected the use of a monster truck somewhere. Or maybe clowns. Something like that. Naturally, when I find out the actual details of this "game change", it's always a let-down. It's someone who could throw 10 feet farther, or a guy who's hard to tackle or maybe a new touchdown dance.
Changing the Game? I guess. To an outside observer, the game hasn't changed much, but to the person who has followed every nuance of the game, who understands its innards and has come to enjoy their complete understanding of those mechanisms, whatever "he" did, is indeed a total Game-Changer. And there it is:
Usual creates Preference and Preference creates Usual.
Adding a woman to a team, or black guy, or a gay man is really Changing the Game - at least to those that know and live and breathe by the Game we've always been playing. To those people, the change is drastic. Caustic. It changes everything about anything they've loved and developed preference for, even if that change seems relatively small to everyone else. Because,
Usual creates Preference and Preference creates Usual.
It doesn't matter what the change is. The change could be good or bad. It could be something as simple as letting your kids learn from a teacher that sports tattoos. Or maybe adding a vegetarian option at your local cafeteria. For those that take comfort in the Usual, every change is an affront to the way things were.
This is the way it's always been. This is the way I prefer it. What was wrong with the old way? Why do you want to destroy MY happiness? It's not just me. I am speaking for everyone I know. I am heroically defending our rights not to be subjugated to this change - this change that you all are ramming down our throats! All this time I've worked myself up to how I and my like-minded people are suddenly being mistreated by this drastic and completely unwarranted change, I am becoming more and more ignorant to how I got here, and to the understanding of the timeless, ancient cycle that is:
Usual creates Preference and Preference creates Usual.
Let's talk about Amazon. It wasn't that long ago when Amazon was simply selling books online. The power of Amazon was that you could get nearly any book you wanted, regardless of how popular it was.
Prior to Amazon's success, if you had gone into a bookstore, you would see a lot of copies of books from preferred and usual authors like Danielle Steele and John Grisham and Tom Clancy et. al. Meanwhile, other very talented, but unknown authors waited quietly in the background, hoping that they could somehow get published, and be given shelf-space in some remote corner of your local B. Dalton's. Bookstores are a business and like any business, they found that 80 percent of their sales were for 20 percent of the available authors. Understandable.
Amazon started out that way as well - selling usual books from usual authors. They competed for keywords in Google's search like "John Grisham" and "Tom Clancy" and what-have-you. But it didn't take long before they started to see the inevitable results of giving people more choices: people started diversifying. People started to find out that they had other preferences outside of what was usual. As a result, Amazon makes a lot more money nowadays from all unknown authors and products more than it makes off the popular, usual ones. Even more interesting, was that the popular authors wound up having a lot fewer sales as some people presumably realized, "Wait a minute! Dan Brown is terrible!"
Did Amazon change the game? Maybe. But how much of a change did they really make? They just sold a greater variety of books and products than any brick-and-mortar store could reasonably house in one location. If the major contribution of Amazon was that they simply were able to supply more choices to people, then how much of a game change is that, really?
Now consider the idea that if people - PEOPLE - did not overcome their trained preferences for the usual, what would have happened to Amazon. If there never was a demand for anything but the usual authors, then there would be far less reason to wait for a book to be shipped to you that you could easily get today from the store around the corner. Both things had to happen for the significant change we have today.
Usual creates Preference and Preference creates Usual.
For that matter, every TV show that you see. Every movie. Everything - anything - whereby the change was simply the addition of more choices, allows people to express and find out what their preferences really are. You may absolutely prefer chocolate over vanilla, if those are the only choices given to you - until someone offers strawberry. And if that new choice doesn't destroy your entire paradigm of what ice-cream is supposed to be; if you don't find yourself saying, in a codgery old voice, "goddammit if I'll ever eat no ice-cream what's got fruit in it!", you might even find out that you prefer strawberry.
So right now, you might be tempted to look at yourself with a certain level of smug satisfaction because you're soooo open to change. Cool. Good for you. You might also be thinking that the thrust of this terribly long, terribly-written screed is that change isn't scary and that we shouldn't be so darned frightened of it. But that's just a pretentious narrative we like to tell ourselves. "THEY are scared. I am brave."
Let's be clear. I'm not trying to type out the same old adage pulled from every musical ever, whereby our hero wants to leave his hum-drum little town to brave the world beyond, or the hero wants to get the elders to change but darnit, they're too entrenched in TRADITIOOOON!!. This has nothing to do with that.
Usual creates Preference and Preference creates Usual.
This isn't about their fear. It's about our convenience. It's convenience for those of us that have grown accustomed and have learned to gain the most benefits from the system of Usual. Change means that our system will have to be re-worked, and that is incredibly inconvenient for us. Sometimes that inconvenience is nothing more than simply having to go through the trouble of re-evaluating our values. Our fear-mongering is merely a reaction to that.
With that said, women getting the vote didn't hurt us. It helped us. Ending slavery didn't hurt us. It helped us. Gay marriage doesn't hurt us. It helps us. If we think about it, all of these things should have been this way to begin with. We would certainly have been better off if they had. And yet, reactions to the inconvenience, perceived or otherwise, of things like this continue to be outsized and grandiose in every cycle. Every. Single. Cycle.
"This is not Usual. I do not Prefer this. Nobody I know Prefers this."
As I've grown older, I have always liked to think that the window upon the world that I peer through gets larger and larger, and that I see more of the world for what it actually is. Instead, all I have really found is that the window is even smaller than I originally thought it was. It is that way because
Usual creates Preference and Preference creates Usual.
Realizing this - truly realizing this at the moment of our inconvenience, would be the real Game-Changer.