Josh, Stop Playing Football Manager

—This was written before sleep. Hence the melodrama, and the sense of (false?) pathos in the words. It’s originally advice for my good friend Josh who has, recently, fallen prey to Football Manager 2021. I extended it but tried to keep the style consistent.

Do not fall into the hell of Football Manager. For hell is just all which oneself can be and never is. All the possibilities that surround, like specters, like ghosts, around actuality—the pure matrix of potentiality that is borne out of a resolute affirmation and a weak falling to temptation.

And the very sadness that it is not God, not Lady Fortuna, not Destiny, but we ourselves who have to choose what world we should, and will, inhabit. And that, unlike the almighty, we do not often choose the best of all possible worlds, but the worst. And all the worse for the fact that we are self-conscious creatures who are condemned to know that we are responsible, and this is the mess that we have created—of our own Will (of course, an ever-allusive faculty because of our inclination to delude ourselves through this fairytale of our impotence).

And the very sting of the “might have been”, that remains—as they are like to say—”a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.” Hell is this acerbic realization of the Will when faced with the temporal past that it is not only weak to but completely helpless. Hell is the obstinacy of reality to all regret and sorrow. Hell is actuality’s indifference to the Will’s youthful frivolity.

And the very sense of the infinity of time, and the finitude of men, and the breach—for better or worse—of consciousness in its time-bound anxiety within this stream of foreverness. Time need not be infinite, though, for our finitude to be significant. For it does seem to the greatest philosophical speculators that we need less time than time needs us. That we are redeemers rather than hostages of time. And hell is to divine our redemptive potential and to squander it in unthinkingness.

Therefore, my friend, please do not play Football Manager 2021.