Plus Other Signs of a Plastic Culture and a General Societal Collapse.

There’s nothing wrong with pickleball... in the same way there’s nothing wrong with eating marshmallows for dinner. It’s not evil. It’s not a crisis. It’s just a flashing neon sign that something deeper in our culture has gone soft.

Pickleball isn’t a sport. Anything you can become an expert in within 10 minutes isn't a sport.

It’s what happens when a society gets too tired to bend over and pick up a real tennis ball. It’s tennis after being passed through three rounds of corporate focus groups and a safety committee. Tennis is a sport of precision and endurance. Pickleball is what happens when we design games so nobody has to sweat or stretch too far.

But here’s the thing: the game isn’t the point.

The culture surrounding it is. We have become too soft, weak and slow compared to our parents.

We’ve quietly replaced almost everything real with a downgraded, plastic version. Meaningfulness traded for convenience. Effort swapped for optimization. Depth replaced with whatever is easiest to package, market, and sell.

• Real food became energy bars.
• Real news became fifteen-second clips.
• Real relationships turned into apps that are basically gambling machines.
• Real conversation was replaced by group chats we mute out of self-defense.

And now real sports get downgraded to “tennis, but with training wheels.”

Pickleball is popular because it is frictionless. No skill barrier, no discomfort, no commitment, no stakes. Just light, portable, marketable “fun” in a neat package. It’s engineered for maximum participation and minimum effort. Which is exactly why corporations, retirement communities, influencers, and suburban marketing departments jumped on it like it’s the second coming of sliced bread.

It’s not a pastime, it’s branding disguised as exercise.

That’s the bigger problem. Everything is being reduced to the lowest-energy version of itself.

Hobbies aren’t about joy anymore; they’re about ease.

Entertainment isn’t about curiosity; it’s about convenience.

Sports aren’t about challenge; they’re about inclusivity metrics and sponsorship opportunities.

Pickleball isn’t a cultural revolution, it’s a symptom. A tidy, colorful, neon sign that we’ve built a society where effort is suspicious, discomfort is dangerous, and challenge is considered a psychological burden.

We keep sanding the edges off life until there’s nothing left to hold on to.

This isn’t about nostalgia or “back in my day.”

It’s about what happens when every aspect of culture gets streamlined into soft, rounded, easily digestible, market-friendly paste.

If the highlight of adult recreation is swinging a hollow paddle at a whiffle ball, maybe we’re not thriving. Maybe we’re just tired.

Maybe we’re so burned out that we don’t want real engagement anymore, we want the illusion of it.

Pickleball isn’t destroying society.

It’s simply showing us what we’ve let ourselves become: a culture of substitutions, shortcuts, and sanitized “fun.”

A plastic culture in an increasingly synthetic age.

I feel like the guy in the crow’s nest on the Titanic, watching the iceberg slide into view while everyone else is glued to Jack and Rose playing kissyface. I’m up there screaming to turn the damn ship.

At this rate, we’ll all be eating nutrient paste out of a squeezable tube instead of bothering with a knife and fork and think we’re improving society.

News flash: innovation does not equal improvement.

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