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I think the absurd level of skill in a lot of those things do tend to serve as effective barriers to entry as well. I’ll use youth sports as an example. We have a system in youth sports that’s absolutely insane. If you want to play sports, you have to put in an insane amount of time, energy and effort to make the team — and select teams often begin at 8 years old. If you make it to the place where you can expect to play high school sports, you’ve likely been playing on select and traveling teams from second grade onward. And aside from the games, tournaments, and team practices, you’ve likely been taking lessons as well. Which means that you have to have the time and money to put 20 hours a week into that one sport.
But suppose you’re a kid of middling talent. Well, basically, 99% of team sports are closed off to you. Sorry champ, too bad you’re not super talented. And the predictable result of this is… either you’re a stand out superstar player of your chosen sport, or you might as well quit. Did they stop desiring to play baseball, or is it so insanely difficult for kids to make the team that they end up playing baseball on their Xbox One instead of with friends outdoors. And then you end up with the twin crises of obesity (because only the top 10% of kids actually get to play any team sports) and loneliness (because team sports turns out to be an easy way for boys to make friends) and can’t quite understand why.
I think even for other things, participation goes down when people are led to believe that they need to be good at something or do it seriously if you want to participate. You feel pressure to find deeper meanings for the books you read, or the shows you watch. You have to read tge stuff on booktok or some other curated list. If you happen to like a nerd-coded show or movie series, you have to learn the lore and follow fan theories and there are often things to collect or whatever. I think for me I almost don’t want to get into those kinds of series because of the absurd competition to know all the stuff to feel comfortable talking to other fans because they’ll have learned all the lore. It’s almost like all hobbies have become competitive in a sense, you can’t just do the thing you have to do it to a social media friendly level.
I think honestly that the standards of 1962 were better for the country because at some point, good enough is good enough and you gain more social health by letting average people participate in those kinds of activities instead of limiting those social opportunities t9 just the hyper competitive people.
I read this paragraph, and immediately the analogy to online dating (which, AIUI, has increasingly taken over dating as a whole) comes to mind.
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