I think there is little doubt that the world will never be quite devoid of trouble and problems, from the most minor to the universal. Nor am I just talking about major political issues, nor that deep philosophical existentialism which everybody feels and then feels special for feeling. Petty arguments with friends, work deadlines, family troubles: without meaning to indulge in the fatalism in which plenty of people wallow in Cambridge, life isn’t just smooth sailing.

Nor is it simply a question of ignoring problems, of turning your back, of thinking of something else. The nature of personal problems is that they are troubling and they are personal; were one simply able to dissociate from the negative aspects of life, they couldn’t really be called significant problems. Unfortunately, most things in life affect people yet remain out of their control, whether it be political legislation or family bereavements, social intolerance or personal slights. What makes them so problematic is that they have consequences, material and personal, which are impossible to ignore.
Nevertheless, that’s not to say one could not, at least momentarily, alleviate the pain, or find another purpose with which to partially suppress those worries which life inevitably brings. And I’m not necessarily suggesting spiritual Buddhism (admirable yet often unobtainable), nor intense hedonism (morally questionable) nor ritual suicide (distinctly unadvisable). After all, nihilism (and nihilists) are all well and good in Kierkegaard, The Brothers Karamazov and The Big Lebowski, yet, let’s face it, offer slightly extravagant, never mind pretentious, solutions to overcoming the inevitable speedbumps of daily existence.

The answer is found in something both purposeful and meaningless, inclusive yet inconsequential. Judging from where this article appears in Varsity, and it has not just been placed on the back page because I have nothing to say about the EU or the CUSU elections, the answer is probably quite obvious: the answer is sport.

To dispel the naysayers who cry foul of sport, who highlight its corruption, its inequality, the endemic nature of cheating, its crass capitalist commercialisation, its Eurocentric globalisation, its ritual violence and hooliganism or its tendency to promote figures who represent the worst of the morally defunct, sexually deviant, meaninglessly vulgar materialism of the modern world, I should probably clarify my definition of sport. I am not talking of FIFA’s resurrection of Brezhnev’s policies, nor of athletics’ resurrection of Nietzschean morality. Sport, effectively, is solely physical exercise in some sort of systematic form. It exists like this both when being played and being watched. It is this purer, more moderate, interaction with sport which can have so many beneficial consequences.

Benefit number one: it’s inconsequential. What?! It is? Clearly I forget my own floods of tears following Chelsea’s victory over Bayern Munich in the 2012 Champions League. It would perhaps not be wise to air that opinion among the football fans of the Ruhr, or Rio de Janeiro. Nevertheless, especially in moderation, it is essentially true. If the government cuts, or, let’s say, abolishes student loans, hundreds of students would be prevented from getting the university education they deserve. Certain vocational opportunities would disappear, and through no fault of their own, people would no longer have the chance to fulfil their potential and shape their future. These are consequences, consequences which one has no control over.

There is little doubt that when any team which I support wins or loses, emotions are inextricably bound up with the result. It could be despair, or anguish, or delight, and for the most important of matches it could last a few days. Yet that’s the very joy of sport; it creates powerful emotions, without affecting our lives in any significant way. Once pulled out of my Drogba-induced nightmare in June 2012, I could look around and realise that nothing in my life had changed for the worse, despite the fact that I had felt, for a weekend, like a character in Magnolia walking around with Gary Jules playing ‘Mad World’ in my head on repeat. The friends I had were still there, my family continues to live, my future prospects remain just as bright or bleak as I had left them.

Sport, and attachment to sport, can often create its own bubble of emotion and meaning. Once you’re 85 minutes into a marathon, or a football match, or into watching a F1 race, or at the crease, or into a fifth tennis set, or the final kilometres of Liège-Bastogne-Liège, little else matters but what you’re currently so deeply invested in. For those few moments you feel like the sport has become a matter of life and death. Sport can give such an intensity of feeling, yet when you’re done, life just continues as normal.

Ernest Hemingway once said that the only sports in the world were mountaineering, bull-fighting, and motor-racing. If death wasn’t peeping round every bend, waiting to clasp in its arms the sportsmen who had just made a fatal wrong step, it could hardly be classified as a true sport. “The rest,” he said, “are just games”. Yet it’s precisely because they are games – just games, in the vast scheme of things, but which remain so vitally important for that one moment of total submersion – that modern sports can be such a powerful tool. For a few minutes every week, all the little hiccups of life can be swallowed and forgotten about.

And that’s not to mention the physical, social, and mental benefits sport can provide. That I will leave to science to prove – which it has. Yet sport does not necessarily have to be good simply because it releases endorphins and increases sociability – so does downing a bottle of wine and running up the Eiffel tower. Sometimes, it can be just that silver lining in a grey week. Unless you support Aston Villa. Then again, be joyful that your unfortunate birth/family/young childhood selection of Aston Villa as your football team has no other obvious effects on how your life will develop.

If one were to fuse the existentialist nihilism of 3 a.m. smoking areas and combine it with my defence of sport, my argument would be thus; sport is like life. Life, if one believes Nietzsche (not compulsory, I may add), exists without a god. Thus, perhaps, there is no inherent meaning to it. Neither is there any inherent meaning in sport. It exists; but it doesn’t change the world, eradicate social inequality, or invent cures for cancer. Nevertheless, when you’re engaged in sport, as we all are in life, we create our meaning for it. And sometimes that’s what can keep us going.