Pick a favorite football team

You're a kid, and you see this guy on TV. He runs fast. He catches balls. The announcers are yelling about how great he is.

And the next thing you know, you're putting posters of him up on your wall. And you have a favorite team. And you want to go to games and cheer for your team.

But then you're a teenager, and you can't help but think, "What does it matter if my team wins?" The other team wants to win just as badly. And even if they lose, there is always next year, and the year after that.

It doesn't matter.

So you stop watching. And when it comes up in conversation, you try to hide the smugness with which you say, "I just can't bring myself to care about it." Because you care about important things.

You care about things you can directly influence. You've shrunken your circle of concern to almost completely overlap with your circle of influence.

This is much better than your mom. She never misses the nightly news because she is so interested in things far outside her circle of influence:

But then you get even smarter.

You're not only interested in things you can influence, but things that matter. Things that will last. Save some rainforests. Eliminate some poverty. Maybe get some humans out into outer space.

Not enough.

Humanity is a blip in the history of Earth, let alone the history of the Universe.

Now you realize that nothing matters. You care about nothing. You live for nothing.

You are very smart.

You are very empty.

Or...

You keep cheering for that team. You get fired up when they win and disappointed when they lose. You find friends who agree and disagree with you, and you enjoy debating about what could or should have been done.

You find a person that matters to you. Together you create little persons that matter to both of you.

And someday none of it will matter to anyone else. Someday there won't even be anyone else. But that doesn't matter to you. Because the present is what matters. The near future is what matters. There is no council smarty-pants that conclusively determined that the distant future was more important than the here and now.

And fuck, if you can think yourself into everything not mattering, why not think yourself into the opposite? Why not find meaning in things and people and moments? Why not pick a favorite football team and care about how they're playing today, about their prospects for this season?

Why not decide that a moment on the couch with someone you love matters as much as a moment, eons from now, when this rock in space is no more?

Deciding what matters to you is the fundamental challenge of being alive.

Meet this challenge.

Remember that deciding that nothing matters — like deciding that everything matters — is to fail in the face of this one fundamental challenge of life.

Pick a favorite football team.

Pick people that matter to you.

Moments that matter.

Stand up and meet life in your own way.