Believe in Democracy? Then admit it: you enjoy losing. (It's OK.)

I don't mean to sound like a doomsayer. I'm not trying to "own the libs" or whatever its opposite may be.

What I mean is that when you live in a democracy, you won't always win. You might even only rarely win. That's the way it goes when you agree to do things with other people. Your enjoyment of that togetherness means that you don't have to win every time or even most times.

Your willingness to compromise comes from the same thing that makes you believe in a democracy, because you want to do things, together.

Most couples get this. So do most families.

It gets more difficult, this losing, as we move into larger and larger social networks. We accept a certain amount of losing when we love a sports team. Some will go decades without, their continued support a sign of their loyalty. These are superfans. But when you're playing on a team in a sports league that's alway losing, maybe you'd try to find a better team. Loyalty is different as a player. Even more different from the perspective as a team's owner.

When we see a losing streak serving a greater good, it's OK. In the contexts of sports fandom, most are sophisticated enough to know the dynamics of team play: some theory of what a team's trying to build towards. So a fan gets to understanding a year or two "rebuilding."

While emotionally involved in a given team's most intricate decisions, able to sometimes find an "in" on the most private aspects of the game (through reporting and social media accounts of players), when it comes to game time, even the superfan reduces their search for belonging to a minimum: they sit in the stands where all they can contribute is their enthusiasm for the team.

In these moments, they can help birth that elusive sense of momentum which academics dis. We think a player or team suddenly erupts finding again the "big mo," momentum; academic studies tend to show that there's no such thing as a "hot hand," a team suddenly catching fire. (Rather they see a consistency from the best players that simply continues to assert itself, no matter the score). But that's not what we experience when supporting a player or a team. We can sense something elusive in shifting momentum, an emerging phenomena.

The cornered animal, still within us from our long evolutionary trek, an animal we can see who has the odds against them, somehow still survives. They get themselves out of a corner. From a stance of being far behind, they advance on the scoreboard. They initiate another emerging phenomena called the "comeback." Momentum shifts, things click. Players who were missing easy shots or easy passes, seemingly, suddenly, stop missing and start making the easy shots and then the wild ones that truly define them.

The greatest players go from being cornered, to being their regular selves who pull rabbits out of hats. And for this, we love them as fans--but more as humans, everyday folks who live often more in ruts than streaks of saves.

The games we watch are like sped up lives, where decisions which change the momentum seem fewer and far between.

That's the place most people play out their little democracies at work or home. Sometimes even the most compromising team player still needs to shine on their own, from time to time. A parent recognizes that one of their brood needs their moment.

It's complicated, these bright windows of opportunity which show up in our lives. How often are they of our own making? Rarely are they only that way, but some people do seem to create these windows, imposing their skill within the confines of the rules. Or bending themselves or the rules or both--or in some instances breaking things.

We've become accustom to this idea of moving fast and breaking things in the tech world. Yet what was being broken in these contexts were often the mores of a staid mode of doing business. They weren't really re-creating the world. Sometimes the marketing of their efforts, however, have seemed like that was the case. Especially when it comes to our devices, those mobile portals for experiencing the world. Rarely has it seemed, in history, as if "most of us" had so much access to the dynamics which give form to our everyday lives. This has been some of the gift of our technological progress over the last decades, from expanding tools within the workplace, to their disruptions in our daily lives.

Yet somehow, in all the groups we belong to because of how technology allows us to, we have found ourselves cornered.

In our daily lives, now filled with as much information, from as varied sources, as some kind of prince or king--or president--might have had access to in the past, we don't feel as empowered as we hoped we would. Many of us have begun to put down our devices so as to reconnect with people or places--and of course often see those around us still clinging to the technologies we turned off, momentarily (and finding even our places reconfigured so as to "require" our technology to enjoy them).

This kind of loss feels different. This kind of corner feels...existential, as the phrase goes which has come to dominate some American conversations over the last decade. This candidate or that will be an agent of destruction even as many of us feel that this moment seethes of ends. "Late capitalism" or "climate change" or a political system seemingly unable to fathom a crisis of violence which it refuses to control.

Doomsaying and doomscrolling takes losing to another level. What kind of loss is it that crashes the whole game? A loss one can afford is one that enables you to come back on another day. Life certainly deals up a few experiences which seem to morph one into a black hole, temporarily. It doesn't feel temporary when one is engulfed in the great, true losses of life. Such events do stop some or change them irrevocably. Others find ways to continue: with help from family, friends, deep beliefs, professional counselors (spiritual to secular).

We have become accustomed, in the 21st century, to see too often that the best of life shows itself in earlier decades. A culture so atuned to fomenting youth, on the one hand, doesn't always see that wisdom comes from decades on the other side of youth. Tech cultures, especially those over the last decades which have found mathematicians at their core, sometimes project this dependence on youth. Mathematicians are said to have flourished their genius by 20-someting or been decided a failure, despite academic appointments. Yet there's much to be said about those who take an unusual approach, who accustom themselves to live without the expected medals.

For some of us, the long run has taught us much about loss. Our rejection of "the sturm and drang" of the leading players of the moment has inoculated us against losses some great throng of you feels or worries about. When the larger social network forces see themselves trapped in corners, we come out of the woodwork. Used to tight spots, we think differently, and cast a different vision. We show how the loss which seems to have enveloped a whole group is temporary.

In these moments, cranks, crooks and (true) cowards also pop into view. For as soon as you're willing to consider an alternative path than a main stream, you see all kinds. False prophets (false flags), conspiracies du jour. We forget that we're all involved in conspiracies daily: the good ones we christen "collaboration,' the other ones we binge watch on our streaming networks, trying to cognitively grasp the enormity.

Be wary of those who have an axe to grind. Separate the kooks and crazies from the ones who quietly have a different way about them, the ones who'd have no problem not contributing to what you've assumed was the right way to go (but were wrong). Watch out for those who have seemed as if they were "saving up" for some kind of payback moment. (Say no to "retribution.")

Some think we're in a "post-truth" world of "alternative facts." This just means that we have diverged from a few ways of gathering stories and news and moved into a multiverse of information. We will have to hammer each other back into a consensus somehow. It won't be by continually dissing each other's alternative universes. We will eventually figure out, again that too much information is not a boundary condition about below-the-belt, but about how much any human wants to hear about any other human, daily, ever.

We'll have to reconfigure our individual and social network salience, choosing not from algorithms but what really matters. (This often means leaving predictive processing to our brains and not empowering technology with our dis/likes.)

We'll have to figure out a way that most of us can survive one another and learn to laugh, again, at difference; far from this being some kind of juvenile attack, those focusing attention on purely superficial separations, in comedy can also be very adult ways of assuring everyone is seen. (Some of us grew up with comedians who were always making fun of stereotypes.) As adults, we can see each other for how different we are, especially when joking about the way we see one another, then find a way that includes us all, forward, laughing together, at each others' foibles. In these too-sparse moments, we see each other for how 99% we are the same.

And the loss we feel will become, for the time being, transmogrified into that thing we've all been striving towards: victory!

We will soon lose again, mostly, all the time. But then we'll find a new way to win--again. It's only human.

Refusing to admit you lost is kind of refusing to admit you're human. We all lose, all the time. The point of life sometimes is as mundane as simply getting up, again: another sunrise, another sunset.

At a further remove, refusing to admit loss is also saying you don't want to play "the game" at all.

In these moments, and depending on the context, you'll have to make a choice about whether or not you then listen to a crook, crank, kook--or all of the above.

In the America Game, you're a player: that's the call, the place within your own life and our larger social networks. (Note: Beware any game you're opting out of; just because you leave it doesn't mean others have. Beware how they may change the game.)

-J. Michael Vore