When I was growing up, sports was just kind of my deal. I didn’t always love them, but I had a natural skill at some of them, so people always put me in them. I was decent at basketball, volleyball, baseball, long jump (had the school record for a couple of weeks) and was weirdly good at football when I was in grade school. In junior high, I ran track and was fairly fast. I started liking basketball way more as soon as I wasn’t on the school team. I wasn’t a man in any other way. I didn’t like to hunt or fish, I couldn’t repair cars or fix things, and I wasn’t really good at talking to girls or being a leader, so I kind of had to cling to sports. 

Being athletic came relatively easy to me. I picked up the rules really easily and could catch, shoot, jump and stuff that was required for most sports…until I couldn’t. I played a little basketball on an intramural team and played for my church teams until my knees gave out, near 40. Kids these days don’t really do sports as much. A lot of what we used to do they do online. I don’t know if kids even realize what football is if they aren’t playing Madden. They might not know what golf is unless they are playing Tiger Woods 2K19. And they think a real sport is Rocket League, a video game that is a car driving around a field ramming a ball into a goal like a soccer game.

I’m almost positive some kids have grown up thinking video games are a sport. I should also add that I grew up thinking it would be amazing to work on video games as a living.

Nowadays, I think there is another sport that some people engage in on the internet. Some people think it is a full-time sport. The relatively new sport that started back in the early days of the internet. Trolling. If you think about it though, trolling has been around since the beginning of time. They were just in the form of critics. The object of the game is to make creative people think their work is useless. 

Being creative is one of the hardest things to be. First of all, because you are creative you usually think outside the lines, so things like math, science, engineering, and other rules-based disciplines are hard for them. Most creative people careers are a go big or go home type of thing. Think of them: Writing, art, music, acting, photography, video, and editing. Most of those careers are either super low paying things that people have to do on the side for free, or they have to be famous. You don’t see a lot of middle-level artists that were encouraged by their parents to pursue their mid-level dreams.

You don’t see trolls booing computer programmers, or accountants or scientists. Trolls are movie critics, music critics, Golden Globe award judges, YouTube commenters. They have no idea how much work, dedication, and effort it took to make a 2-hour long movie, a 4-minute song, or a 300-page book. They have no idea how hard a person worked to write a post, create a perfect photo, or make a 60-hour video game. They just care that their two minutes with a video, the five minutes with a post, or the two hours with a movie wasn’t completely mindblowing, original, or absolutely worth their time or money.

I think they should just go hide underneath the bridge they were born under.

What do you think? Do you have a bunch of trolls in your life? Or commenting on your blog? Or thinking your life’s work isn’t completely life changing?

ARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH

Bitter Troll Bridge Ben