Mediocrity and Social Contribution

Why do martial arts?

I have a better question: why do anything? You're going to die, and it'll accomplish very little in the next 1000 years for you to really do anything with your life. Oh that's right, because individuals do impact society, either by their own exploits or as part of a communal contribution. What was I thinking...

There's very little for us to do in life but enjoy ourselves and try to make a contribution to the species, because we are finite beings. We won't get to see what happens in the twenty-third century, so we have two things we can do: we can enjoy our short lives, and we can do what we can to ensure that we make humanity better. We're like bricks in a house, whether you want to recognise it or not we leave behind a mark on humanity, and each of us is important in the whole: our individual actions affect small groups, which affect larger groups, which affect larger groups in turn, which can affect society and even civilisation.

So maybe your training is for fun. So is mine. But in addition to the training itself, I find satisfaction in pushing myself and achieving new things, new heights. This might affect other people who I train with, make them push harder, and they might go out and affect other people. Or they might not, I might affect them negatively by making them feel bad, and they might soon stop training because they feel outclassed and that there's no point, and might go on to focus on other aspects, and end up affecting those areas.

Why do I train? Because I enjoy it. I'm the kind of person who enjoys martial arts, I don't know why. I don't know why I enjoy writing as well. Maybe I'm looking to understand myself and the world around me, and have chosen these routes to try and do so. I find things like football to be trivial (perhaps because I see it as a shall, media-drenched, over-hyped sport which takes up too much of human concern where it should be spent elsewhere), other people don't (it brings them enjoyment to watch it or to play it). So which is better? Who is right?

Athletes of extraordinary skill have come out of both football and martial arts, who have, for thousands of years, pushed the known boundaries of the human capability to its very limits. There are also athletes of moderate skill (the supporting bands in music). Both football and martial arts also have the amateurs, people who aren't famous but still train in and play them anyway. Why would they bother? They enjoy it. Moving beyond amateurs' concerns, I'm sure a fair few of the professional athletes are quite humbled by the number of amateurs there are who look up to them, driving them to perform better, which in turn gives the amateurs a higher pedestal to move toward, to look up to.

For years I've always thought of football as something that humanity might be better off without. But I've come to realise that it is, quite simply, the result of human creativity, of the drive to seek pleasure and happiness, and more lately the result of such a large a population of intelligent beings. There can only be so many people who contribute to any one field before the progress of that field can go no faster. Generally, the professionals will make the largest contribution, and the amateurs will sit in their shadows, trying to be like them, living their lives for their own reasons.

Maybe we won't all be famous and acclaimed, and the success rate for that is low. But maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point is that, while enjoying our training, we also enjoy the idea, the fantasy, that maybe one day we can be that good. Fantasy can be a lot more powerful than reality in such matters. So why do I train? Why do I write? Because I enjoy them, but why do I enjoy them? Because maybe there's part of me that despite my doubts, believes that I can be famous, that I can leave my mark on humanity. Maybe volvox's altruism gene wasn't the only gene that a species contained for the good of the colony.