Happy Saturday!
Not the Saturday we were hoping for, of course. Instead of getting ourselves ready to see the Matildas in tomorrow’s World Cup Final, our eyes are on tonight’s third-place play-off against Sweden.
I’m still licking my wounds from Wednesday’s defeat, but I’m also still on a high from the Tillies’ amazing run. For this weekend’s newsletter, I’ve reflected on how the last few weeks felt to be a part of, and what they mean.
The Tillies and togetherness
This World Cup, I had a catchphrase.
At my local pub, elbow to elbow with hundreds of fans, so many that my brother physically couldn’t get in the door: “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
On the TV, watching a rippling sea of green and gold, hearing the roar as Raso or Kerr or Fowler found the back of the net: “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
On my phone, scrolling endlessly through every reaction video I could get my hands on, of hordes in Fed Square, in Olympic Park, in the stands of an AFL match, in country pubs, in hipster dive bars: “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
I reached for those words because they were so obviously true. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t seen anything like it. Nothing had even come close.
I was too young to properly remember Cathy Freeman’s gold medal in 2000, a moment many people point to as an event of similar magnitude. Since then, I struggle to even think of candidates for comparison.
The Olympics? The occasional TV series finale? The election of Trump? These were all moments where it felt like everyone at work and everyone you passed on the street was talking about the same thing. But none match the collective mania of this astonishing August.
It’s easy to get caught up in the rush of an event that has just happened and to overstate its significance.
However, there is some data to support the idea that moments like this World Cup are rare.
Most obviously, there’s the TV ratings data – Channel 7 estimates Wednesday night’s semi-final was viewed by an astonishing 11.15 million people, the largest televised event of any kind since 2001.
But I think there is another story beneath the surface. Could this moment feel so rare because we are less connected to our communities now than in the past?
There are numbers to back this up, too. A recent survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics asked Australians how they spent their time. A similar survey was run in 2006, giving us a glimpse at how our patterns of activity have changed.
The shift is subtle, but distinct: adults today spend 28 minutes less per week socialising and out in their communities than in 2006. The drop-off for young people (aged 15-24) is larger, 42 minutes per week.
This broad category includes a wide variety of activities, from going to a restaurant to talking on the phone. Drilling deeper, the drop has been even more pronounced for some of the activities we most associate with community connectedness.
The time we spend doing community activities (e.g. volunteering) or cultural activities (e.g. watching the Tillies together) has fallen from 98 minutes per week for the typical adult to just 21 minutes. For the average young person, the time spent on these activities is barely enough to register.
These numbers are a formal way of describing a trend many of us have probably already felt: we are not as connected to one another as we would like to be. Surveys of loneliness show persistently high levels of people who feel isolated, with the worst results consistently among the young.
Can a few football games fix all that? Of course not. But the warm Matildas glow that so many of us experienced could serve as a reminder of something we’re missing, and could inspire a few of us to do more, whether by following sport more closely, playing it ourselves, or seeking out other means of connecting with others.
When I shared some similar thoughts on social media after Wednesday’s game, one response I received summed up my feelings exactly: “I’d go as far to say that we’re hungry for it, starved of it”.
I may not have seen anything quite like the community joy of this World Cup before, but I hope it’s not too long before we see something like it again.
Do you want to support The Daily Aus?
TDA always gets asked: How do we make money?
The answer is through partnerships. But for the first time, we're asking our audience if they'd be interested in buying something we made. It's a book, called 'No Silly Questions', and it’s all about explaining how the world works (and why you should care).
Any money we make from the book will go straight back into funding our journalism (and making sure we can keep bringing you these newsletters!).
/
The Daily Aus acknowledges the Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation who are the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work. We acknowledge and pay respect to the past, present and future Traditional Custodians and Elders of this nation and the continuation of cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.