All things are wearisome,

more than one can say.

The eye never has enough of seeing,

nor the ear its fill of hearing.

-Bible, book of Ecclesiastes

What is hype?

It’s being served something you don’t want to eat. It is being coerced to get excited for something you don’t give a damn about. Biblically speaking, hype is getting served a cup of gall when you’re dying for a glass of water.

America runs on hype.

What around us is of any substance? This weekend we’ll gather for our annual Superbowl of Fraudulent Fun, to watch celebrities we don’t like do things we don’t care about, whilst being force fed ads for stuff we don’t want. The volume will be at maximum, because if it gets too quiet for even a minute we’ll realize how lame the whole affair is.

Once upon a time there was a chance our hometown Detroit Lions would participate in this grand carnival. All signs pointed towards a glorious conclusion to the 2024-2025 campaign, but in a single evening those dreams were dashed.

I have watched several Detroit seasons come to a inglourious conclusion. Football is a well crafted distraction and when it’s over there’s a depression that lingers over the city for several days to weeks. Imagine the barrenness of mid winter Michigan and how the NFL attempts to medicate that void for months on end. When your team is knocked out, it can feel like the moment they turn the lights on at a nightclub at 4am. Everybody out, we’re closing up! You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here! You look around in the harsh lighting of reality and realize where you are. It’s not a good feeling.

This year for me was different than any other year. I attended in person my first ever Lions game at Ford Field. It was a home playoff game, after the Lions had just completed their most successful regular season in team history. Expectations and hype were through the roof. But for me, the game was a session of exposure therapy.

Seeing it live killed the mystique in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Live games are supposedly the ultimate, live playoff games the penultimate. But seeing it up close changed something in me. You could see some of the wrinkles and notice the choreography. In short, it was like meeting your favorite celebrity and realizing they’re not as cool as you thought. Turns out it was mostly hype all along.

My favorite movie of all time, Moneyball, is about another loser organization - the Oakland A’s. There is a scene in the film where Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, stands in the parking lot with Jonah Hill’s character Peter Brandt.

A magical season has just ended for the A’s, once again in a postseason failure. Not only that, but the stars that made it all possible for Oakland were heading on to other teams, in bigger, more successful markets. The biggest star of them all, Johnny Damon, is headed to the hated Boston Red Sox. Everyone is devastated, yet Hill’s character has a different take:

“I think it’s a good thing you got Damon off your payroll, I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.”

It’s hard to see how losing could be a good thing, but the more I think about it, I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities. When the hype train crashes, when the music stops, in the awkward silence afterwards we can see the emptiness we’ve been medicating underneath. Not only that, but hype eventually ends for everyone, even those who win it all. So while a Lion’s championship would be cool, I strongly suspect the emptiness would quickly come rushing back in.

Boredom, fatigue, lack of purpose, intolerance, and apathy - these are all things that we are kept from addressing by the endless barrage of distraction. And it’s not just the NFL, it’s almost everywhere. America runs on hype, it is the cultural waters in which we swim.

My experience at that playoff game was well worth the price of admission. I walked away with two things: a valuable lesson and a souvenir towel they were handing out. The towel says: “We Want More”. Actually, that’s correct in ways they probably never meant.

We do want more, but not more noise and sizzle.

We want more than just hype, we want substance.

We want abundant life.