Get a Team-Logo Credit Card and/or Change Your Whole Life

In these difficult times, there are many decisions to make: what to wear for work, where to eat for dinner, how hard to cry about all of the day’s myriad failures. At NotGraphs, we understand this. That’s why, with a view to aiding our small but constantly beloved readership, we’d like to make you aware of a decision you don’t have to make.

Sometimes, when signing up for a credit card, a client of this or that bank has the opportunity to select a card featuring a graphic of his favorite baseball team’s logo. Like the Red Sox, for example, which are a baseball team. Or the Cardinals, which are a different baseball team.

While, superficially, the prospect of a Visa bearing the imprint of a professional sporting club might appear to offer some combination of fun and/or games, it actually represents what is known in the psychological community (presumably) as an “existential crossroads.” Which is to say — and, again, this is rock-hard science, almost certainly supported by research somewhere — which is to say, the more inclined one is to request a credit card bearing the name of his favorite team, the more probably that same one has neglected to stare deeply of late into the true Truth.

“The desire for a credit card with the Yankees logo on it, for example,” a medical professional either has or hasn’t said in the author’s presence of late, “is nearly infallible so far as diagnostic tools are concerned. Like, if I find that a patient has purposely requested one of those, I’m immediately like, ‘He’s got little or nothing to live for. Time to bring out the big guns.'”

The conclusion at which one invariably arrives? Avoid such credit cards to whatever degree is possible. And if “to whatever degree is possible” amounts to nothing, then seek help — either with a trained counselor or, at least, by reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” a bunch of times and seeing if it helps at all.