The Small Game and the Wasted Years

 

The Small Game and the Wasted Years

By C.G. Mcfadden

There is a kind of smallness — quiet, grinding, and poisonous — that takes hold of some men as they move into middle age and beyond. It is not the dignity of a life shaped by responsibility and service; it is a preoccupation with trifles, a territorial game of one-upmanship conducted in playgrounds of rumor, grievance, and petty humiliation. To watch it is to feel a profound sadness, because time is the one nonrenewable currency we possess, and these men are spending it as if it were monopoly money.

Ask yourself: what would happen if those hours, those evenings of strategized spite and performance, were redirected into something that actually bore fruit? What would our neighborhoods, our institutions, our grandchildren look like if a fraction of that energy were invested into mentoring, building, teaching, or repair? The hypothetical is not fanciful. It is a moral indictment.

Think in terms of horizons. A life lived well is a set of horizons — family, craft, vocation, community. Those horizons demand competence, patience, and the gradual accrual of skill and character. A small game, on the other hand, is horizon-less. It consumes attention for the sake of immediate elevation above others; it is defensive, not creative. It is easy, because it asks only that you denigrate, conspire, or perform. It asks nothing of you that requires sacrifice or improvement.

Why is this so tragic? First, there is the personal betrayal: a person who fritters away their capacity for influence abandons the duty they owe to their own future self and to those who depend on them. You owe your children, your community, and your conscience better than that. Second, there is the social cost. When men who might otherwise lead, mentor, and stabilize become practitioners of spite, they hollow out the institutions that sustain civilization: the schools, the clubs, the civic bodies. Commons become toxic through neglect and mockery.

What makes these games seductive is not intellectual. They are status economies — signaling rituals dressed as discourse. The participants find immediate reinforcement: attention, the thrill of being noticed, the illusion of power. But notice the long-term arithmetic: attention paid to an unworthy spectacle grows the spectacle and starves what is worthy. We are easily convinced by the loud and the angry; we assign value to volume. That is a cognitive error on a societal scale.

Let me ask you plainly: who benefits when you amplify this nonsense? You — the reader — have power. Your attention is currency. Spend it, and you convert it into consequence. Do you want to bankroll a culture of pettiness, or do you want your attention to seed competence, resilience, and repair?

If you are frustrated, angry, or outraged by the behavior of these men — by their bully rituals, their desperate recourse to social theater — use that emotional energy to build, not to feed the beast. There are concrete alternatives. Teach a kid a skill. Coach a team. Volunteer at a shelter. Start a small enterprise that creates work. Repair the house. Speak up in a meeting with calm facts and clear solutions. These acts do not produce the immediate rush of being noticed; they produce something much rarer: lasting consequence.

How should you respond to the spectacle itself? First, refuse to be enlisted. Bullies and their theatrics need amplification. They require witnesses. They require platforms where their pettiness is converted into perceived influence. Deny them that conversion. Unfollow, block, and ignore. If you must respond — because you share a space with them, because children are watching, because truth needs to be recorded — respond with a brief correction, a calm boundary, and then pivot to constructive work. If their behavior becomes harassment or criminal, document it and use proper channels. Let institutions do what institutions do: adjudicate, sanction, correct. Your personal currency is attention and time; do not spend it on a currency that devalues your life.

Consider the archetypal image of the dragon: chaos to be overcome, a monstrous force guarding treasure. The petty bully is a cheap, domesticated dragon. People stand around and feed it; they laugh; they take selfies with it. But what is the treasure behind the dragon? Often, it is not treasure at all — only attention, which looks like wealth but is ephemeral and corrosive. Invest instead in actually valuable things: competence, skill, family, community. Those are the treasures that survive and repay.

Do not conflate critique with cruelty. To call out pettiness, to refuse to engage with it, is not to demonize an entire demographic. It is to insist on standards of conduct. It is to say: you will be judged by the quality of what you build, not the loudness of your complaint. And if you see someone who has become trapped in a cycle of spite, try to redirect them. Invite them into work that matters. Offer to help them inventory their skills and find a place where those skills can serve. Sometimes the most effective remedy is a tangible project: a community garden, a veterans’ support group, a literacy program. Action displaces resentment.

Finally — and this is crucial — remember that your refusal to be distracted is an act of moral clarity. The world will always be full of petty actors scrambling for status through tearing down. That is a constant. The variable is you: your choices, your investments, your patience. Choose to be a patient builder. Choose not to lend your attention to the theater of the small. Choose to spend your life in a way that, when reviewed from the end, will not look like a series of petty triumphs but rather a trail of genuine contributions.

We will not, in the end, be measured by how loudly we complained, but by what we left behind. So when you see the spectacle, ask yourself: am I participating, or am I building? If you care for your grandchildren, your neighborhood, and the arc of your own conscience, the answer cannot be ambiguous. Reject the small game. Pick up a tool. Create. Teach. Repair. The world needs that work more than it needs another small argument.