Sports betting, high drama, and the eighth deadly sin – latrobebulletinnews.com

Did you know that, before they were the Seven Deadly Sins, they were actually eight dangerous threats to monastic life? The original set of eight dangers was composed as an ancient listicle by a guy named Evagrius of Pontus, who wanted to articulate the spiritual challenges that monks face in a monastery. It wasnt just a guide for behaviors, but for a clerics thought life as well. Devotion to God sought the total elimination of these eight vices.

We know the first seven so what was the eighth vice, the one that got cut? It was called acedia, a word that the ancient Greeks used to describe indifference or uncaring. By the time of early monasticism, the word had changed its meaning to something akin to ennui, listlessness, or numbness. Evagrius characterizes acedia as the most troublesome of all vices to combat. Medieval Christians dubbed this mindset the noonday demon. Its that feeling you get after lunch where your work seems boring and meaningless, your life seems dull and unsolvable, and all you want to do is give up and take a nap.

Still with me after this detour? Lets talk about sports betting.

This column may be one of the last institutions in America that isnt sponsored by Fanduel or Draftkings. Not only has sports betting become so commonplace since its legal establishment in 2018, but its become a massive money maker, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars for the state and billions for this new generation of digital bookies. Im not as concerned about the objective morality of sports betting my biblical ancestors cast lots to figure out Gods will after all but I am interested in what the rise in sports betting says about our times.

A friend of mine made the observation that sports betting is marketed as a way of becoming more invested in the games. The appeal of sports betting is that it ratchets up the drama of sports, which are already dramatic in their own right. Wins and losses mean more when money is on the line. Even for the casual fan, the drama of knowing that many gamblers lost their shirts or made their fortunes because of the latest upset or breakout performance adds to the fun. Not only do we predict who wins games each week, but now, we pick our winners against the spread (the point differential between the winner and loser), and tease those whose bets didnt pay out on Monday mornings.

Doesnt it seem odd that we take the most dramatic and engaging social tradition of our time and declare that it isnt exciting enough? Have we become so bored with the upsets, underdogs, and fandom unity that sports gives us that we need some sort of psychological hot sauce to spice it up even more?

From this angle, the popularity and profit of sports betting seems to be a symptom of a societywide case of acedia. Humans will do anything to avoid that sense of purposelessness or boredom, which is why Evagrius declared the state of ennui to be so dangerous. So many of us are fighting off the noon-day demon with our own distractions, our own enhanced dramas, and our own quiet angers. We might also view our endless online scrolling, the acceleration of life, and political rage as a response to our societal acedia, to say nothing of streaming, binging, or virtual reality. Commenting on the matter, the English cleric Charles Caleb Colton articulated that the noonday demon has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair. Colton himself had firsthand experience, winning and losing a lifetime fortune in gambling.

Somewhere, behind the artificial distractions of gambling, addiction, scrolling, trolling, raging, and binging, is a deep dissatisfaction. Anyone who wants to live a good, free, and fulfilling life will need to push the distractions aside and dive headfirst into that void. Im confident that what we find there will be the first step to a longer journey of healing and wholeness.

How confident? Im more confident of this than the Steelers and Cardinals hitting the over this Sunday, a 1p.m. game that will help stave off my noonday demons.

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Sports betting, high drama, and the eighth deadly sin - latrobebulletinnews.com