Here's a piece on joy in gymnastics

[conuly]

What gets me is one of the top-level comments:


klejarde
4:23 PM EDT
Of course gymnastics is joyful! When you win. Just like basketball is joyful when you win, soccer is joyful when you win, curling is joyful when you...you get the idea.

What a dreary life this person must lead! What about just having fun without worrying about "winning" and "losing"? Especially when it comes to solo sports like gymnastics, how can you possibly enjoy those if you're always competing against anybody but yourself? I hope they don't apply that depressing little philosophy to their entire lives. "Sure, eating is joyful. When you're at the best restaurant money can buy. Sure, cooking is joyful. When you're a master chef. Sure, reading is joyful. When you're reading a CLASSIC and finishing it before the rest of the class. Sure, having a cat is joyful. When it's a prizewinning purebred." I don't even want to speculate on this guy's approach to: math, sex, children, or gardening.

"When you win." What a stupid idea!

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Buh...?!? "How rare the opportunity to LEARN things"....?

That's not just sad and limited, it's downright irrational, cockamamie, in blatant conflict with experiential reality: where is there NOT an opportunity to learn things? Walk outside into the yard, talk to any person, go to any library or book department, fire up the Google Machine... if a person isn't finding more opportunities to learn things than they could ever live long enough to take advantage of, it's because they're not looking.

I do notice that many adults, and, sadly, some children also, have the notion that they can't learn things unless they're formally taught by someone else. They won't just buy a fiddle at a yard-sale and find a Youtube on how to tune the thing, or take out a library book on beginner knitting, public speaking, teach-yourself-trigonometry or whatever, or view the source on some web-page to figure out how the code works... there has to be a class, and a teacher, and they will wait passively for the teacher to tell them exactly what to do before they try anything.