Another World Cup, and this time I can barely engage. I don't care for its controversies, I don't care for its debates, I don't care for the dulcet tones of commentators or cliches of retired footballers turned pundits. I particularly don't care for the sudden deluge of alcohol adverts.
Maybe the main reason for this decline in interest is that I'm no longer a daydreamer. I no longer play my own 90 minutes of football a day, squeezed into school break-times and lunch hours. I no longer feel the temptation to wear a suit while playing Football Manager. I no longer turn up to Sunday league games and celebrate like Thierry Henry or Alan Shearer if I scored a goal.
Our lives now are built like one giant comedown. At some point in the trajectory of history, it was decided by parents universally not to treat their children like their private slaves, there to be scolded and handed chores to and derided. Instead they swung to the other end of the pendulum and decided childhood should be a trouble-free zone of endless discoveries and Kodak Moments. But lying to some children about the realities of life was the easy part, changing the adult world was far harder. So the adult world remained a cold world ambivalent to individual misfortunes, where those raised on a diet of rocks and beatings thrive and the sheltered dreamers bruise like ripe peaches. When childhood ends, we are left with one long disjoined Blue Monday, unsure of our place in the universe, everything seems confusing and hurts, there's no warm blanket of self delusion to hold to anymore.
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