by Nathan Coumbe

Baseball follows the decline of American democracy

“Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. 

Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience. That means it requires a lot of compromise. Democracy is the slow politics of the half-loaf. 

Baseball is the game of the long season, where small, incremental differences decide who wins and who loses particular games, series, seasons. In baseball, you know going to the ballpark that the chances are you may win, but you also may lose. There’s no certainty, no given. You know when the season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time; the worst team is going to win a third of the time. The argument over 162 games—that middle third. 

So it’s a game you can’t like if winning’s everything. And democracy is that way, too.” 

—George Will, “Ken Burns: Baseball“

I would now posit that Americans’ declining interest in, and ability to watch and focus on, baseball directly correlates to our declining democratic ideals. 

When winning is everything—like it is in the new American pastime, football—and our culture reflects that, American democracy can no longer function. 

Baseball has become the jazz music of American sports culture: something we created that truly reflects who we are as a culture, yet no one cares about anymore.

Baseball and jazz—two of the greatest cultural creations that are 100% genuine American innovations—are the same two things most Americans don’t care about, understand, or appreciate. 

We’ve traded cerebral, authentically human jazz for three-minute pop songs, mostly created by computers with singers who rely on autotune to hit anything above or below a 5-note range. A 162-game baseball season over 8 months, for a 16-game football season that lasts 5 months. 

I’ve often said that our declining interest and ability to follow baseball is an indication of social media’s detrimental impact on our ability to focus for long periods. 

Now I’m quite certain it heralds something much worse.

by Nathan Coumbe

If this were the last thing you did…

Would you be proud of what you were doing?

How you were doing it?

Who you were doing it for?

Mindfulness in each task leads to mindfulness in all things.

by Nathan Coumbe

Fear keeps the majority out of power

It only takes one person for something evil to occur. For example, one of the reasons many authoritarian countries haven’t changed their regime already is that the vast majority of people live in fear of the handful of people who would commit evil on behalf of the leaders.

This is a question of power. If every single person in the country realized that they only have power because they can get other people to do bad things, the leaders would no longer be in power. 

The flipside of that is that it only requires one person being willing to harm or kill another for these people to be able to keep their power. 

It’s contagious—one person begets another person willing to commit harm (or too scared to refuse). Pretty soon, a tiny minority of people grows who are willing to commit evil to keep this one person in power.

Because not everyone says no, the minority rules, and the majority seems powerless. As such, the people who are in the majority must seemingly be willing to face death at the hands of the minority to effect change.

by Nathan Coumbe

The system usually wins

The system may be wrong, but it often has more power than your individual will.

It doesn’t matter how good the change is you want to make. If the system is set up to prevent it, you’ll fail.

Therefore, you often have to work within the system to get the results you want, even if you don’t like it.

by Nathan Coumbe

Freedom has obligations

It’s not oxymoronic; it’s built into the very idea of freedom.

We have forgotten that personal liberty actually comes with obligations. We assume that it means that we’re free to do whatever we want, regardless of the consequences.

But liberty comes with a social contract. We are obligated to be decent to others, to be members of a society that considers the welfare of others, and to care about what other people think about our actions, especially when those actions affect them. 

Just as it’s easier than ever to get a divorce and leave your family—to leave that “obligation” behind—we seem to think that we can abandon principles because we are “free.”

Viktor Frankl, who survived the very worst of what humanity is capable of in the Holocaust, proposed that the United States build a second statue on the West Coast to accompany the Statue of Liberty on the East.

It was to be a Statue of Responsibility. He recognized, and I hope you will as well, that you cannot have the former without the latter.

by Nathan Coumbe

Let regret guide you

Don’t let it paralyze you.

If you failed to do something through inaction, hesitation, or indecision, remember the feeling of regret it left in your gut.

Not to punish yourself or

Another opportunity of some kind will come your way, and you’ll feel hesitant or indecisive again. But if you remember the regret you felt the last time, you’ll realize how much better you’ll feel this time if you act.

Use it to make better decisions in the future.

by Nathan Coumbe

Start from 0, not 100

Thanks to our school systems, our parents, and our bosses, we tend to default to a “100” mindset. We look at everything we should or have done from this framing: “how far from 100 am I?”

How far from perfect is my effort or my attempt?

It’s incredibly unhealthy and unhelpful for making progress or creating change.

So you didn’t attend the protests yesterday? What have you done instead?

Maybe you’ve written tons of letters, made dozens of phone calls to your representatives, and encouraged others to do the same. That’s more than most, so you can comfortably give yourself at least a 75/100.

You didn’t eat perfectly cooked meals that align with your macros to the thousandth decimal place or get in your intensive, tactical workout to help you look like Thor?

Who cares? Did you eat some vegetables? Did you go for a walk or do yoga? You did a lot more than nothing.

Instead of looking at everything starting from 100, why not consider how far away you are from 0?

It’s not just incrementally better, it’s infinitely better!

Doing something, however small or seemingly insignificant, is uncalculably better than doing nothing at all.

by Nathan Coumbe

Why would they do this?

There’s a line in Crucial Conversations worth memorizing:

“Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what this person is doing?”

Most of our behaviors aren’t irrational. Some of them are unconscious, but people rarely do things for “bad” reasons.

Everyone sees themselves as the “good guy” in the story. This means they must be doing this action for a rational reason. It’s solving a problem for them. It’s in service to something they value.

And it might be completely and totally awful to a great many other people. But the first step in fixing something is to understand it.

You might not know why right away, but it’s worth sitting with the question. It might help you find the solution to irrationality.

by Nathan Coumbe

Fairness is based on expectations

If we don’t know what we mean when we talk of fairness, we can’t make informed decisions on whether something is fair or not.

The first step is to set an agreed-upon expectation of what fairness means to the group.

by Nathan Coumbe

Courage starts with you

It’s tempting to ask why people who have more power than you don’t use that power to change the situation.

But what about you? Why can’t you muster the courage to write a letter, make a phone call, or attend an event?

If you’re afraid to do something small in service to the change you want to make, how can you possibly expect someone else to do something bigger and potentially more consequential?

Often, the bigger the impact an action has, the more courage is required to act.

So, you must start small. Start with yourself, with the small things you know you can do.

Be brave in the little moments to model courage for others when the big moments come.