What it's like to hate sports

Every time I blog about how being forced to do sports just makes you hate it (like I did below), I inevitably get backlash from people who love sports. There's a key miscommunication here: people who love sports simply cannot conceptualize what it's like to hate sports. They have this idea that sports are fun, and they don't seem able to see the other side. This is a problem because all the expert-consultant-type people on trying to make society more active are all phys. ed. teacher/kineseology student types, all of whom enjoy sports, because if they didn't enjoy sports they would ahve picked another profession.

So here are some truths you need to understand for us to have a reasonable dialogue about physical activity:

- Physical activity is not fun. If I happen to be having fun doing some sport or active game, it's despite the fact that it involves physical activity, not because of it.
- If you increase the physical exertion or competitiveness involved in something I enjoy, I will enjoy it less.
- If I am bored, doing physical activity will not make me less bored. In fact, it will probably make me more bored, because part of my brain has to focus on the physicality of the activity, which reduces my ability to think my own thoughts.
- If you said to me "Hurry up, you have to do [insert sport here] right now, this is your last chance ever in your life to do [insert sport here]!" I wouldn't be motivated to change my plans. There is no sport or physical activity in the world that I care about or enjoy enough that I'd even blink if I never had the chance to do it again. With many sports, I'd rejoice in the fact that I never have to do it again.
- If you said to me "Hurry up, this is your last chance to do any sports at all ever again!", I still wouldn't be motivated to change my plans for the same reason listed above. Again, I'd probably rejoice.
- For me, physical activity is a chore. It's like doing the dishes or taking out the recycling. If you gave me a choice between the dishes doing themselves for the rest of my life or never having to do physical activity for the rest of my life, I would pick no physical activity, without hesitation.
- For me, physical activity is undignified. Sweating, running after a ball, stretching - they aren't the sort of thing I want people to see me doing. Putting me in a situation where other people can see me doing physical activity is as humiliating to me as having those people watch me take a dump or getting a pap smear or drooling in the dentist's chair.

At this point, all you sports-lovers out there are saying "But that's not true!" But this is my point: even if these statements aren't true for you, they are true for me, just like for me olives and cantaloupe are yucky. If you want to cook a dish I'll enjoy, you have to take as a given that olives and cantaloupe are yucky; if you want to create a physical activity scheme that will work for me, you have to take as a given that these statements are true and plan accordingly.

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ETA: Same thing, but in analogy form.

You've never been too fond of scrubbing the floor. You've been exposed to it your whole life as your parents exposed you to most aspects of everyday life, but you've never really liked it. If you could choose anything to do in the whole wide world, you would never choose to scrub the floor.

However, they recently did some studies that found that the nation's floors are perilously dirty, so they added floor-scrubbing to the school curriculum.

Floor-scrubbing classes made you start to actively hate scrubbing the floor. You had to wear this ugly floor-scrubbing apron and use this grungy industrial sponge that everyone else in the school has used for the past who-knows-how-many years. Your teacher would stand over you and yell at you whenever you missed a spot, even if it was just that you hadn't gotten to that spot yet. Your knees always hurt if you kneel a long time, but if you don't stay on your hands and knees you lose marks for poor technique; this results in a grade that's significantly lower than all your other marks, and brings down your overall average. Plus, your classmates have always tormented you at the slightest opportunities, and floor-scrubbing class gives them a lot of fodder. They mock you for being in the undignified hands-and-knees position, they poke at your bum (and the teacher deducts marks for poor technique if you use a position that protects your bum), they throw dirty water at you when the teacher's back is turned, they deliberately walk on your section of floor with their dirty shoes...

So when you've completed your final mandatory floor-scrubbing class, you're ecstatic.

From then on, you do everything possible to avoid scrubbing the floor. You take on other chores instead, leaving the floor-scrubbing for your roommates. Once you move into your own apartment, you vacuum and mop and spot-clean, avoiding scrubbing unless absolutely necessary. Your floor is clean enough for your purposes - there's certainly nothing unsanitary about it - but it will never be as clean as the floors of those people who love scrubbing the floor, and scrub it on their hands and knees every day. And you're fine with that, you don't need it to be surgically clean. (In fact, secretly and to yourself, you kind of think that people who keep their floors surgically clean must be rather dull individuals, and you have no desire to meet or socialize with such people.)

Then one day you see a newspaper article about the shameful state of the nation's floors. Some floor-scrubbing experts - the kind of people who love floor-scrubbing so much they studied it at a post-secondary level - are recommending that floor-scrubbing be manadatory year-round throughout students' entire educational careers. It's also offering parents tax credits for enrolling their kids in after-school floor-scrubbing classes - but only for the kind of floor-scrubbing that's on your hands and knees with a sponge. If the kids prefer mopping - or if they prefer to learn how to cook or garden instead - the parents don't get any tax credits.

Do you really think these additional measures are going to help? Or do they just strike you as cruel humiliations that will just make those kids hate scrubbing the floor as adults?