Most Americans intuitively know, for example, that soccer can ruin lives. No offense to four-year-olds, who are frequently delightful people, but who wants to spend their Friday night watching four-year-olds play soccer? Actually, to be fair, no four-year-old is actually playing soccer. Instead, the children are simply running around in spirals or half-heartedly staring into middle distance or cheerfully poking giant, dangerous-looking ant piles with their cleats. They don’t want to be there either! They could be poking dangerous-looking ant piles at home.

Moreover, if your child turns out to eventually be good at soccer, the “reward” involves spending each Saturday for the next ten years of your life driving said child to four separate same-day soccer tournaments held in four different towns each two hours from each other, with the first tournament starting at 5:45 a.m. When viewed from space, these interconnected tournament towns may or may not form the shape of an evil-looking goat sporting an inverted pentagram tattoo, or perhaps even a coded message translating into “What if I told you that ruining your weekends would not get your child into Stanford, foolish mortals, ha ha ho ho ha?”