When you see a wealthy person in a movie or series, and you imagine yourself where he is for a moment, what exactly do you imagine? Many writers and philosophers believed that what we actually imagine is the manifestation of freedom. This is what ignites our nerve receptors and gives us that temporary feeling of pleasure. In practice, wealth is only a path to freedom in its various meanings.
So we imagine ourselves driving the cars of the rich, living in their homes, where others serve us, and not having to think, plan or worry about the future. The reason here is our body's constant desire to reach satiety, stability and inertia, a situation in which the least muscular and mental energy is sufficient to obtain necessary, even unnecessary, needs.
The question then is: Why would Alphonso Davies, one of the world's best pbacks and the number one star of his country, who earns 30,1 euros a day, guarantees at least one title per season, and lives in Germany's richest and most prestigious province, feel so lonely that he considers himself a "famous failure"? (2) (<>)
Let's imagine the scenario
Now imagine that you are that rich indeed, and as soon as you wake up, you turned to your luxurious bathroom attached to your spacious bedroom, which is equivalent to the size of the apartment you now inhabit, and after you washed, you went out to your balcony for breakfast in front of a charming scene that is not available to 99.99% of the world's population, then you picked out your clothes after an hour of confusion in front of a closet containing everything you wished for in your life, and then you went down the stairs. No, I took the elevator. No, but the servants came and carried you to the parking garage where a fleet of your dream cars rested.
Alphonso Davies was born in a refugee camp in Ghana before moving to Canada at the age of five. His parents had fled Liberia to escape civil war.
Today he's one of the best left-backs in the world. pic.twitter.com/Su2JBKvUgp
โ Frank Khalid OBE (@FrankKhalidUK) March 16, 2023
You chose the right car after deep thought about what exactly you were going to do today, then turned the engine and drove through the gate of your motorized garden that recognized your voiceprint. Let's stand here with another important question: what did you think about while choosing a car? What exactly would you do on this day if you were free without appointments, obligations, burdens or responsibilities? What did your heart go to after you were assured of having everything you needed? Will you drive with no other purpose than to impress strangers?
As you think, you'll get to part of Davies' answer as well, and you'll discover the first problem here; we never imagine the next step because our thinking is governed by a crisis mentality, and the crisis here is need. Thinking "What's next?" is a luxury that's hard to imagine as long as we're in crisis.
Wealth itself is only a means of wealth in its literal sense, that is, dispensing and not needing, and what Davies implicitly said in his last live broadcast on Twitch is that he did not expect that this dispensation would involve long times without his family, friends and girlfriend, with no one to share his happiness with what he has accomplished.
Davies probably fell into the same trap; when he was a crisis immigrant dreaming of wealth, success and fame, he could not imagine what would go beyond his crisis, and he thought that all his problems would be solved automatically once he achieved what he wanted, so what he actually wanted to express was frustration. Reality, a surprise, wasn't as fantastic. (3)
First World Problems
Of course, you are telling yourself now that this is the greatest frustration in history, and you wish to be one of those poor people, where the most extreme problems of life are the alienation of family, the lack of friends and alienation. Feeling it all in the Jacuzzi, while driving a Mercedes, or poolside is bound to be very painful.
Try to imagine that the degree of loneliness and depression that a man suffers from has led him to share these pains and worries with thousands of strangers online, exposing himself to the risk of ridicule, ridicule, venting hatred, and therefore further isolation and alienation. That's how brave a man is, or how desperate he is, we don't know exactly
After moving several times from one club to another, and having to say goodbye to their friends and neighbors each time, they decided to stop getting to know neighbors or have any long-term relationships with their surroundings, and succumbed to loneliness and isolation, and to the fact that all this was sacrificed in favor of financial safety and additional luxuries. (4)
This was part of a study conducted by the British Sociological Association a few years ago, in which it was found that the vast majority of the 34 players who underwent it, who are active in England's four professional divisions, suffered from loneliness, isolation and depression, and in most cases, their families' psychological state affected their performance on the field, and from here, they moved to lower-level clubs, and their careers slowly declined, and some lost everything because their children and wife began to blame them for their suffering, and some had to move alone. Without. (4)
Canada finest...... ๐๏ธ
And hereโs @AlphonsoDavies picking up picking up Canada player of the year award. pic.twitter.com/SH9q27Fo7v
โ Darren L. Jack (@Dazincanada) March 29, 2023
This is the moment when successful famous rich people discover that they are normal human beings, immune to suffering and pain. The irony here is that most of them, especially in a field like football, most of its stars come from simple social and material backgrounds like Davies โ will share in society's self-flagellation; it is not only people who will consider him rude, but he will also consider himself so, because he was once in their place, and he looked at the famous successful rich in the same way.
With time, his envied possessions turn into the daily embodiment of this loneliness; this car is the reason why he cannot share his worries, this huge house is what prevents people from understanding his position, and this salary at that club is what makes him appear rude whenever he tries to exercise his humanity, as if he traded it all for loneliness and isolation.
Alone in Covid
The last phrase may apply to any wealthy person whom people decide to dehumanize, but it has applied to most of us during the pandemic. In fact, this time is an excellent example of what Davis wanted to express.
Club player welfare officials tell many horrific stories about players' struggles during the coronavirus pandemic, of consecutive weeks of quarantine booking, and parents who died without getting a chance to say goodbye. (Getty Images)
If you have experienced the effects of the pandemic, you must remember the boredom of having to stay at home for long periods, the intense fear of infection whenever you go out, the general feeling of gloom and isolation imposed by faces covered in masks all the time, and at some point, you must have told yourself that you were ready to do anything to end that atmosphere, and normal life must have seemed much nicer and without problems at the time, and you must have forgotten all that when you came back. Life is indeed normal.
Club Players' Care Officers tell many harrowing stories of players' struggles in those days: consecutive weeks of quarantine booking, parents who died without a chance to say goodbye, and children born without their professional parents being able to see and hold them. (5)
Those difficult days passed differently for expatriate footballers, and while most of us struggled with our parents for a measure of privacy and freedom while working at home, the famous successful wealthy players understood the value of family, friends and company, and the fact that the original purpose of getting rich was to have a better life with them, not to have to choose between one and that. (6)
Tom Yang, a psychological performance analyst for sports clubs, confirms that the best levels of the team come after the FIFA international stops, for a simple and intuitive human reason that does not need a psychological performance analyst to realize, which is that most players who come from distant countries have the opportunity to visit their families, give them gifts, and relive the feelings of childhood in a familiar atmosphere, in short, all the free life grants that we only feel their value when we lose them. (5)
"For elite footballers, the effects of covid-19 linger for months"https://t.co/bWGxhpUBgp pic.twitter.com/EUbC41Xb6P
โ Eric Topol (@EricTopol) January 6, 2022
Those simple moments that these players experience four times a season with international stoppages are what make them feel the value of their sacrifices: when they make a noticeable impact on the lives of those they love, when they see and feel it, it reflects on them and recharges their determination to continue.
Things and I
Believe it or not, a study published in the Harvard Business School in collaboration with the University at Buffalo confirms that preferring professional and financial gains to family and friends all the time in a repetitive lifestyle leads you to unhappiness. Believe it or not; this study makes a lot of sense. (7)
Subjects talked about the last feeling you could imagine a professionally and financially fulfilling person would feel, whether it's a football player like Davis or in any other field: dependency and need.
Dependency to what exactly? For their achievements, possessions and wealth, and the need for more of them, simply because in the absence of intimate connections with family and friends, and those who love you regardless of your material circumstances and professional success, you surround yourself with strangers who only notice what your current life shows, and appreciate only your achievements and possessions, and this leads you to accumulate more of them in search of more human value in the eyes of others.
Anyone who has had to travel or migrate in search of work, a higher income, or a better life for himself or his family will feel the same way, and will easily realize that the largest salary has never and will never replace his humanity and feelings for those he loves, or his sense of need for friends and comrades. (8) (9)
The truth is that all players despair, frustrate, depressed, miss loved ones, and have the right to feel lonely even if they are rich. (Reuters)
Similarly, players feel a huge responsibility towards their families, especially with the randomness of the game and its injuries that may end the career of any of them at any moment, and with their short lives on the courts, often any of them is their only chance to escape poverty forever, and this pushes them to maximize the gains of the years they spend at the top of their level, so they sacrifice a lot for this goal. (10)
Of course, many of them have everything they wanted, and the life they asked for would come true without the paradox of their loved ones, and some, like Davis, think a lot before turning on the engine of their luxury car, but all of them despair, frustrated, depressed, miss their loved ones, and all have the right to feel lonely even if they are rich. Recognizing this, and acknowledging their right to complain and the authenticity of their suffering, is not only a sign of maturity and humanity, and not only a way to appreciate what we actually have, but most importantly it protects our souls from our unrealistic perceptions of life, which push us to sacrifice everything to reach material satisfaction, under the illusion that it will enrich us from everything else.
The equation is not always zero, of course, and the choices are not always that extreme, but logic says that there is a price for everything we achieve and get. This is the grey space that we can control and monitor, to make sure that, in our quest, we don't exchange those we love for what we need, because a unit on the poolside or in the luxurious Mercedes cabin is still a unit after all.
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