Why I Love the Olympics Now More Than Ever

Lately, the world has been feeling like… a lot. The kind of a lot that makes you open your news app, sigh deeply, and briefly consider becoming a person who lives off-grid and churns her own butter. It’s dark out there. Loud. Heavy. And when you’re already carrying groceries, children, deadlines, and the long mental to-do list for your entire family, it can feel like too much to handle.

Which is why I find this idea increasingly comforting: somewhere else, right now, someone is having the best day of their life.

I remember reading once about people whose birthdays fall on September 11. Before 2001, it was just another date. A day for cake and balloons and “sorry it’s a weekday.” Afterward, it became something else entirely, etched into our collective memory as a day of grief and fear. And yet, for millions of people, that date still holds joy. Weddings. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Proof that even the darkest days have more than one story running through them at the same time.

When we’re stuck in our own sadness or anger, it’s easy to forget that. Our experience starts to feel universal, like everyone everywhere should be as upset as we are. Social media doesn’t help. It happily builds us a custom bunker of outrage, reinforcing the idea that the world is ending and everyone should agree on how and why.

Enter the Olympics.

For the next couple of weeks, we’re given a different kind of interruption, one that isn’t hollow or manufactured. This isn’t “feel-good news” designed to distract us the way chocolate cake distracts us from doing our taxes (delicious, but ultimately unhelpful). The Olympics are real. Real people. Real sacrifices. Real risk. These athletes have rearranged their entire lives for a shot at one moment, one race, one routine, one jump.

And today - TODAY! - some of them will win!

Halfway across the world, someone will stand stunned on a podium, tears streaming, realizing that everything they hoped for and dreamed about actually happened. Coaches will cry. Parents will cry. Grown adults who swore they “don’t get emotional about sports” will absolutely cry. Yes, others will lose, and that ache will be real too. But even then, there’s something quietly brave about showing up, about trying for the pinnacle, even if you fall short.

Watching the Olympics isn’t an escape from reality. It’s a widening of it. A reminder that the world is not a single story or mood. That your worst day can exist alongside someone else’s best - and somehow that’s comforting, not cruel. It loosens our grip on the idea that our feelings are the final word on how things are.

So I’m inviting you: watch the Olympics with me. Even if you don’t love sports. Even if you don’t know the rules. Even if you just wander in during the dramatic slow-motion replays or just catch the primetime highlights. Let it remind you that the world is bigger than your bunker, and that joy is still breaking through, somewhere, even now.