The Super Bowl should've been yesterday

Happy Presidents' Day

Today is Presidents’ Day, easily America’s weirdest holiday, an unholy amalgamation of George Washington’s Birthday and Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday. But it’s also a day off for Slow Boring because everyone is traveling. Kate and I went to San Antonio for the long weekend to visit family, and Ben, who is younger and more industrious, ran the Austin marathon yesterday (congrats, Ben!).

It was a good time for a trip since in addition to today’s holiday, DC Public Schools also had Friday off for one of the inexplicable closure days that are a regular feature of the public school calendar. That meant Kate and Ben and I had to really cook last week to get content ready, which is fine — we all enjoy our jobs and aren’t averse to hard work. But I, at least, was struggling, in no small part because I was incredibly sluggish on Monday after staying up late watching an overtime football game with friends, consuming unhealthy snacks, and even drinking some alcoholic beverages.

My suspicion is that I was not the only person watching that game!

In fact, the word on the street is that it was the most-watched telecast in American history. Honestly, I have no idea exactly how you measure something like that. We had different people in and out of our house at different times. But clearly a lot of people watch the Super Bowl. And the snacks and drinks are part of the tradition. A tradition that — unlike President’s Day — has a lot of meaning to a lot of people. I like football, but I don’t really love it (for me, that’s basketball). But the Super Bowl is a lot of fun, not just as a television program or a sporting event, but as a ritual that brings people together. At our house we had kids over and childless adults, reasonably serious sports fans and people who were just there for the nachos. And that’s fun!

Now, of course, you could just have a bunch of friends over to your house on completely arbitrary days. And that is a thing that happens.

But in practice, it facilitates socializing to have events like the Super Bowl that serve as Schelling points. If you believe — as I certainly do — that the decline of in-person socializing is a bad trend, it’s still not entirely clear what we can do about it. I am glad that my phone and my television and my streaming video and audio options are all dramatically better than they were fifteen years ago, and I wouldn’t want to give that up and neither would anyone else. But I do think it’s harming us, collectively, as a society, to have made it easier and more comfortable to stay home rather than do things that build connections with people. And the Super Bowl is something that gets people out of the house and hanging out, because gathering with friends is a tradition and it’s only very loosely about the literal television viewing experience.

But the Super Bowl Monday is a legendarily low productivity day at work, not just at Slow Boring but for the economy as a whole. Tons of people call in “sick.” Others are just tired and bleary.

The solution is obvious — we should re-enforce the power of Super Bowl Sunday by aligning it with the random February Monday off, encouraging people to stay out late partying with friends and bolstering America’s fractured social capital.

Back tomorrow with more a more serious take (for paid subscribers) about anarchists, socialists, and public libraries. Happy Presidents’ Day!