If the 'Rona works like other national catastrophes, post-'Rona America is going to develop an almost visceral revulsion for two things we currently love to the point of addiction.
One, lists of nothing in particular.
And two, brackets of nothing in particular.
We love lists, to the point where it has crowded out actual information and been called "content." We also love brackets as mega-lists, but they're a bit more labor-intensive. You just drop an item without context or nuance into a slot, compare it to something that has nothing to do with it and then come up with a mythical "winner." You know how it works. It eats time and fistfights with boredom. In these days, they're the perfect antidote to being stir-crazy or standing in long lines too close to other people.
But when this ends, it seems reasonable to ask if we will look at these useful constructs and be repelled by the memories they conjure. We may have consumed lists and brackets at such a rate that we will be sick of the sight of them when things like "the car" and "outside" make their inevitable comebacks.
This germ of an idea came in a flash of Twitter when someone offered up one of those community topics, a starter list to spark other lists. The list in question:
Places I've Lived.
This came atop Top Ten Movie Trains, Name A Video Game You've Put At Least 100 Hours Into, Stefon Diggs' Top Five Receivers and the new History of Triscuits fixation, and ignores all the mock drafts, lists of countries still playing professional soccer games (we're down to Andorra, Belarus, Burundi and Nicaragua), 2021 Top 25 College Basketball teams and My Favorite Game In Such-And-Whatnot Competition. Lists and brackets became the default position in the absence of games, and hey, whatever gets you through the day. But Places I've Lived convinced me — we are going to avoid lists and brackets when global health returns to normal.
Whatever "normal" is in global health.
True, we are more addicted to lists and brackets than most things in sports; many people regard them as better than the actual games because games take longer, they are reality that can't be controlled and once they are over, there are no alternate universes where a loss suddenly becomes a win. It's how people survive being New York Jets fans.
And right now, if lists and brackets do it for you, fabulous. This isn't the thought police here — although in honesty, that would be a pretty cool job when aimed at some people.
But the more of these we endure now, the less we are going to want them later. We are eating these two natural resources at a fairly frightening clip to plow us through the tough times, and here's betting we're going to have list and bracket fatigue. I mean, it's not like we have long attention spans as a culture; we bore easily.
Add to that the aversion to the memories we are making now and what you get is a bear market for list and bracket futures. What replaces it is anyone's guess — lists of actual things that happened as opposed to the stupid opinions of the uninformed, and 64-team free-for-alls maybe? No clue here. Like Dr. Anthony Fauci, our one and true leader in these perilous times, I know when to say, "I don't know."
But I'm eager to find out. Damned eager.
