Way too much more time for his own research

'Cause on a mission, your worst enemy is idle time - Nipsey Hussle, “Killer”

The last activity from Aaron Rodgers on X, Das Alles App, is a retweet of the walking death mask joke of the pandemic and Reefer Madness for Zoomers author, Alex Berenson, from June of last year. Predictably, it’s a vaccine conspiracy theory post that is plausible the way it was plausible to me when I was six that I could die from the sliver in my thumb if it was left there, went further under the skin, and subsequently traveled to my heart if I was too scared of getting it tweezed out.

With the sewer Elon Musk gets to play King of Turdwaffen in that the former Twitter has become, Rodgers staying away is a bit of an upset (he’s also gone quiet on Instagram as well). He’s a guy who pretends to hate attention while so obviously relishing it. His weekly opportunity to go viral on Pat McAfee’s show. His dangling a possibility of being RFK’s running mate. When his now-former team was on HBO’s Hard Knocks.

It’s that “former” part that has me very worried, though. Maybe some team desperate for relevance or stoned on the thought that there’s a defense that could help Rodgers be the 2025 version of the Peyton Manning Broncos signs a guy who it seems is now team culture poison. I’d be otherwise indifferent to Rodgers as a player, even appreciative when he’s lighting up anyone but my problem boo, Chicago Bears, but it is also enjoyable when an insufferable personality fails on a grand scale as he did with the Jets.

But if he doesn’t play in the upcoming season, I fear we will be subjected to a much worse public version of him, one who is more demonstrably an avatar for this awful zeitgeist.  

A guy with Rodgers’ ego will not process well his being fired. After being so consistently one of the best QBs in the world, time again showed that it’s undefeated, and Rodgers’ output took a precipitous drop during his time in New York. His physical ability to lead a team while playing the most important and probably most difficult position in sports is in all likelihood cooked at the age of 41. But since he may not have been able to wrap up his career on his own terms, movie soft glow style–and instead being told by one of the more dysfunctional franchises that it’s not us, it’s you–does not seem like something he’ll swallow with humility. 

Besides the murky details about his estrangement from his family that have always stoked suspicion of what kind of person he really is, we have receipts regarding Rodgers’ confrontations with anti-glazing. He was quite vocal about his disconnect with the Packers brass about how they (correctly) did not let him contribute to personnel decisions and weren’t nice enough to his veteran teammates that were let go. He has called his own public criticism of teammates and coaches while the team he was quarterbacking was struggling “what I think is the best interest of our guys.” He said he would not hold a team hostage by sitting on a play-or-retire decision and then did just that. He did the very snotty, dare I say Trumpy, thing of saying the thing that criticized him used to be better before it criticized him. This past December he complained:

 I’m talking about these experts on TV who nobody remembers what they did in their career. So in order for them to stay relevant, they have to make comments that keep them in the conversation. That wasn’t going on in 2008, 2009. The SportsCenter of my youth, those guys made highlights so much fun. And that’s what they showed on SportsCenter.

Then after ESPN’s Ryan Clark called him a "fraud "for that, Rodgers bizarrely responded:

Say whatever the fuck you want about me, I don’t care. But just before you do it, whether you state your name, your accolades, pronouns, whatever it is, just state your vax status, so that anything you say afterwards gets put in the right light. Just get it out there. Because then when you say things about me, people can at least be like, "Oh, you are captured by the multibillion-dollar propaganda Skyhawk and you’re still upset about it." . . .

Hey, you know what I mean? Just put that in the — just so everybody knows where you’re coming from. Everybody knows. OK, cool, you’re twice vaxed Moderna with three booster shots, and then boom, boom, boom say what you want to say, whatever. I don’t care. I’m just saying a PSA, just please help everybody out who’s wondering, "Where is this coming from?" Including myself. I’m like, "Where the fuck’s this coming from?’"But just give a little PSA. Do a little bit of digging and then you know where it’s all coming from. You’re captured, you’re highly vaccinated, and then say whatever the hell you want to say about me because I couldn’t give two shits about it.

So, yeah. That’s a dude who is very deep into the dangerous world of online being interpreted as real life. Without pro football taking up so many hours of his days going forward, where does that leave a guy who is openly willing to consider any conspiracy theory that creeps across his screen or from the lips of any of the various characters nudging him toward other stops on the alternative medicine path Rodgers has embraced.

As Leif Weatherby recently wrote (emphasis his), “Other than being The Quarterback, Aaron is most famous for being publicly picky about what does and doesn’t go in his body. He’s the American Man not as adventurer but as worrier.”

To consider Rodgers as a new age worrywart (and one constantly masking that with an aggressive Cutler-esque mask of saying he doesn't care what you think but totally caring) not only makes the Rodgers enigma clearer (and, no, I haven’t watched the Netflix series on him by that name and don’t plan to) but also more worrisome for what he’ll continue to (d)evolve into post-football. He’s already dabbling in a lifestyle that abuts some of the more problematic segments of society, one not merely annoying but genuinely harmful. And it’s not just the anti-vaxxing community of which he is one of the more prominent celebrity faces. In the last two decades, the crunchy “natural” approach to mental and physical wellness that used to be associated with lefty hippies has increasingly merged with right-wing circles:

“In 2011, Charlotte Ward and David Voas coined the term “conspirituality” in a paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. Ward defined it as “a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fuelled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews”. It describes the sticky intersection of two worlds: the world of yoga and juice cleanses with that of New Age thinking and online theories about secret groups, covertly controlling the universe. It’s a place where you might typically see a vegan influencer imploring their followers to stick to a water fast rather than getting vaccinated, or a meditation instructor reminding her clients of the dangers of 5G, or read an Instagram comment explaining that vaccines are hiding tracking devices. It’s a place where the word “scamdemic” might comfortably run up the side of a pair of yoga pants (88% polyester, £40, also available in “Defund the Media” print, “World Hellth Organisation” and “Masked Sheeple”, in millennial pink).

To apply all of that to Rodgers right now would seem pretty on-brand. And as one gets fed nuggets of “conspirituality” wrapped in advice that seems like common sense to a brain whose b.s. filter has been sanded down after hours upon hours of screen time, one tends to inch farther down various toxic holes that are increasingly more difficult to be rescued from. Mike Tanier writes of him after football:

Rodgers will probably create his own podcast, then abandon it once he realizes he’s merely competing (barely) with Rogan. He’ll talk about entering politics, but he knows his ego would not stomach a loss in the Wisconsin gubenatorial primaries to a former senator’s wife who wants to ban Nancy Drew mysteries. He’ll end up hosting some reality show with toxic leanings: Pole Dancing All Stars; Extreme Wedding Ring Pawn Brokers. He may try to pull a Brady and buy his way into NFL power, but he has already wielded such power. Why would he pay to do something that he recently got paid to do?

Emotionally, the best thing Rodgers can do for himself is live up to his rhetoric by becoming some reclusive transcendental mystic living deep in some mountain cave, starting next Tuesday.

Best thing, sure. But likely? Have we seen a desire from him to be reclusive? Disappearing into literal darkness for four days isn’t very Trappist when he’s advertising it.

Yet we know there is a seed of a bright, empathetic guy in there. The clearly bright Jeopardy! contestant Aaron Rodgers of 2015 and guest host of 2021 was refreshing. Many forget that he was one of the only white players to speak out against Colin Kaepernick’s blackballing by the NFL, saying in 2017, "I think he should be on a roster right now. I think because of his protests, he's not” and saying that he was “100 percent supportive of my teammates or any fellow players who are choosing not to [stand during the national anthem]. They have a battle for racial equality. That's what they're trying to get a conversation started around. . . . I think the best way I can say this is: I don't understand what it's like to be in that situation. What it is to be pulled over, or profiled, or any number of issues that have happened, that Colin was referencing—or any of my teammates have talked to me about."

But 2015, 2017, and 2021 seem like a totally different era for Rodgers and our world in general. That positive seed may be sunken too far into a permafrost of polluted soil to ever sprout. Rodgers is now a guy who will complain about “alphabet gangsters” of the pharma world, and we don’t know if it’s worse if he intentionally misapplied an LGBTQ epithet or not.

A Rodgers retirement from football, whether by his own volition or the league doing its thing of letting you know by just not employing you, just feels more ominous for his place in popular culture moving forward than him continuing a futile fight against his own body.

ESPN’s Dan Graziano said two months ago that Rodgers is “a con artist. He is a narcissist. He is self-absorbed to the absolute maximum.”

Shudder to think what that means for that same guy with more time to “do his own research.”