TL;DR
In a Silicon Valley culture obsessed with optimizing every second of our lives, from health trackers to AI productivity hacks, we have started treating "unproductive" passions like spectator sports and comedy as a waste of time. This is a mistake. As Joel Morris claims in Be Funny or Die these "banalities" are actually essential social technologies.
They provide the commonality, community, catharsis, and connection that make society work, and ultimately, they are what separate us from the algorithms we build.
The Hamster Wheel of Productivity
In this industry, Every day we're surrounded by people trying to hustle their way to a perfect existence. We wear rings that tell us how well we slept, we use AI to summarize emails so we can read more emails, we listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed, and optimize our diets down to the micro-nutrient. In this culture, time is the ultimate currency, and any activity that doesn't yield a measurable ROI, be it health, wealth, or knowledge, is treated with mild suspicion.
This is why, when I talk about my borderline obsession with watching sports, I often get a certain look. It’s a look that says: Why are you wasting three hours watching other people play a game when you could be building a startup, learning Mandarin, or at least doing cold plunges?
Spectator sports, to the Silicon Valley mindset, are a banality. They are trivial. They are "unproductive."
The same attitude often applies to comedy. Why spend time watching stand-up or sharing memes when the world is burning and there are serious problems to solve?
I couldn't disagree more. I recently read Joel Morris’s book Be Funny or Die, which explores the evolutionary and sociological function of comedy.
These "banalities" are not a waste of time. They are the essential infrastructure of a functioning society. And in an age where AI can do almost everything else, they might be the most fundamentally human things we have left.
Here is why we need to stop apologizing for the things that don't optimize us. Below I'll give 4 reasons why these matter more than you think.
The Need for Commonality
If I want to debate Deflategate with a Colts fan, or WhatsApp about Tiger Woods with my mother-in-law, I can. Sports are an equalizer. They give us a shared dictionary.
Morris points out that comedy works the exact same way. Before you can even tell a joke, you need a shared set of references and values. When a joke lands in a room, it’s because everyone in that room has a baseline understanding of the world.
In today’s hyper-polarized, politically toxic climate, we are running out of neutral ground. Everything is an existential debate. Sports and comedy give us permission to engage passionately about things that do not actually matter. They are the social glue that allows us to interact with people outside our immediate echo chambers.
The Need for Community
Morris argues that comedy's primary evolutionary function is tribal cohesion. We laugh more readily in company because laughter is a social act. It signals: I am part of this group, and we are safe.
When a comedian crushes a set, or when your team scores a touchdown, the crowd erupts. In that moment, the usual boundaries of class, race, and politics vanish. You are high-fiving a stranger. You are part of a temporary, powerful tribe. You cannot optimize that feeling using an algorithm.
It's the 2026 World Cup, and for the past week, Boston has been completely taken over by the Scottish. The Tartan Army has descended on the city with an infectious, chaotic joy—marching into baseball games with bagpipes, chartering boat cruises to create floating pubs, impromptu street bucket drummer and bagpipe collabs outside Faneuil Hall, and literally drinking the local taprooms dry.
Last night, coming back on the train from "Boston Stadium" (as FIFA calls it), the scene was surreal: Brazilians, Haitians, and Moroccans all waving their country's flags, dancing together in the middle of the road, and singing "No Scotland, No Party." The contrast is obvious. Yes, it's "just sports," and none of us were on the pitch playing. I could have easily spent that time doing something "productive", like optimizing my sleep score, catching up on emails, or running 64 AI agents in parallel. But looking around at that train car, it was a reminder of life is. It's celebrating, connecting, and enjoying humanity with fellow people from across the world. Nothing beats it.
And it wasn't just Boston. This week while I was in Mexico City, thousands of Colombians and Uzbeks shut down the streets the night before their match — not after a win, before a game that hadn't happened yet! Groups huddled around TVs at taco stands, intently watching matches where their teams weren't even playing. The same thing, in a completely different city, with completely different people.
The Need for Catharsis
Let’s be honest: sports are really the only socially acceptable mechanism we have to hold our heads in absolute despair or cheer at the top of our lungs. If you acted the way you act during a playoff game in the middle of a grocery store, you would be institutionalized.
Morris traces the origins of laughter to early humans signaling relief from danger. The sabre-toothed tiger turned out to be a shadow, so we laughed to tell the tribe the threat was gone. The core formula of comedy is Expectation, Surprise, and Relief.
We live in a high-stress world. We need emotional pressure valves. Comedy gives us permission to process fear, anger, and absurdity. Sports give us permission to scream, cry, and embrace strangers. Society needs these release valves to stay sane.
I felt this most viscerally at Foxboro in January 2015, the Divisional Playoff against the Ravens. It was zero degrees, and cold enough to turn my beer to slush on the walk back from the concession stand to my seat. We were down two scores, twice, and then Julian Edelman caught a lateral and threw a 51-yard touchdown on a trick play that nobody in the stadium saw coming. The place absolutely detonated! The woman in the row behind me grabbed me and kissed me. I have no idea who she was, but there is nowhere else in adult life where any of that is permitted. You can't sob with joy in a board meeting, scream when you send a Slack message, or kiss a stranger because a demo went your way.
Sports hand you a sanctioned reason to feel everything at full volume, and then walk it off. That's releasing the pressure valve that lets you survive the rigors of life.
The Need for Connection
Ultimately, both sports and comedy connect us to the larger human story. We watch athletes overcome adversity, and we see a vehicle for positive motivation. We listen to comedians point out the absurdity of life, and we feel less alone in our own neuroses. They also connect us backward, to the places and people who made us. When Game 3 of that World Series stretched to 18 innings, I was pacing my living room at 2:30 in the morning, white-knuckling my way past the Halloween candy stockpile, and I have rarely felt more tethered to the city I grew up in, and to the kid who used to sit in those stands. A baseball game three time zones and a couple of decades away can still reach across all of it and put you right back home.
Former Chief Justice Earl Warren once said he always turned to the sports pages first because they recorded people's accomplishments, while the front page had nothing but man's failures.
We are currently building machines that can write code, analyze data, and optimize supply chains faster than any human ever could. AI is going to take over the "productive" parts of our lives. What it can't do is feel the heartbreak of watching Alejandro Kirk ground into a broken-bat double play on the golden pitch (with runners on the corners, one out, and a World Series on the line) to end Game 7, in the bottom of the 11th...ok, I may have not gotten over that one.
These banalities that we do to just feel something together, are what make society work. They are what make us different from the AIs.
So the next time a colleague gets on their high horse and tells you that watching sports is childish, or that comedy is a distraction from the "real work," don't apologize. Tell them you are participating in a deeply evolved social technology.
Or just tell them to take off their sleep ring and watch the game.
P.S. I built SlateStar — a simple way to make picks with friends so every game matters a little more. slatestar.app
