The Contradiction of Awareness
It seems like the more aware we are of things, the worse those things become...
One of the biggest trends in the last few decades has been the emphasis on awareness. Raising awareness, promoting awareness, about every kind of issue imaginable. This is probably most associated with social justice issues—raising awareness about forms of injustice and so on—but I don’t even want to focus on that. That’s too easy.
I was struck by a tweet that former NBA coach and current broadcaster Stan Van Gundy made a few days ago that gained some news coverage when NBA superstar Kevin Durant agreed and replied to it. On January 17th, Van Gundy tweeted: “90’s NBA teams had just a trainer and a strength coach, they practiced more often and harder and played more back to backs. Teams now have huge medical & ‘performance’ staffs and value rest over practice. Yet injuries and games missed are way up. Something’s not working!”
Over the last several years, “load management” has become a common practice for NBA teams—resting star players so that their workload is lessened, in the hopes that they will be less likely to be injured. It hasn’t really worked. Star players miss more games than ever—seemingly more and more every year—with nagging hamstring, knee, ankle, adductor, etc issues.
It’s more common that a team will be resting its star players, or that the stars will be out with injuries, than that you’ll get to see a team at full strength. Players are missing so many games that Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr said that the season should be shortened by 10 games—from 82 to 72—so that players could stay healthier. It’s gotten that bad, that prominent coaches are saying the season should be shortened. This would have been unimaginable in the past, but now it might actually happen.
Stan Van Gundy’s tweet feels true. In the days before so much was known about health, fitness, wellness, conditioning, etc., NBA players seemed to be healthier. And it isn’t because they didn’t play as hard back then—quite the opposite. Professional basketball in the 90s was known for being very physical, with defense being a bigger part of the game. Basketball today is less physical, with more emphasis on spacing and free-flowing offense. So as the game gets less physical, and teams pay a fortune for medical and “performance” staff, players are injured more often. What’s going on?
As awareness about health, wellness, and performance has increased, those things have gotten worse. The more attention that gets paid to the issue, to try to improve it, the worse it gets. This is a strange contradiction, isn’t it? But it isn’t that uncommon. You see it in other areas. For example, the emphasis on organic foods and the dangers of trans fats and sugars and bad diets in general has gone along with a massive rise in obesity. Nobody really cared about organic food or the risks of bad eating habits until like twenty years ago—and that’s the same time span that obesity has skyrocketed. The more attention that was paid to eating better, the more unhealthy people have gotten.
With drug awareness too we see this same thing—more attention has been paid to how bad drugs are over the last few decades, and drug addiction has gotten much worse during that time. Before we were inundated with messaging about how bad drugs are, people weren’t addicted as much. The more people have heard about how bad drugs are, the more drug addicts have been created.
We often hear the phrase “knowledge is power.” The idea is that the more you know about something, the more power you should have over that thing. So by this logic, if you have more knowledge about health, then you will become healthier. But clearly this is wrong—as we have gained more knowledge about medical issues, performance issues, dietary issues, people have gotten less healthy, more obese, and more injury-prone.
What conclusion can we draw from all this? Well, I think that knowledge is power, but not in the way we think. Rather, the opposite is the case. It isn’t that the more knowledge we have about something, the more power we get over that thing—but the more knowledge we have about something, the more power that thing has over us. In the same way, the more aware we are of something, the more power it has over us—and the worse it gets.