“You Got to Do What You Got to Do, Right?”

I’ve been listening to a fair amount of This American Life. I guess I just dig vocal fry.

Sometimes, the show tells an escape story but I usually forget to mention it here because I listen in bed and forget all about it by sunrise. Miraculously I have remembered one.

“Who is Ryan Long?” tells the story of a game show contestant called, well, Ryan Long. He did extremely well on TV’s Jeopardy!, winning almost $300,000.

Ryan was introduced to the telly-viewing public as as a rideshare driver but he’d actually been something of a factotum. Throughout his thirties, he’d worked in airport security worker, as a package handler, an office clerk, a piano mover, a warehouse worker, a “water ice guy”, a cashier, a bouncer, and a street sweeper. He says, “You got to do what you got to do, right?”

Ryan is biracial and physically large, which apparently isn’t the typical profile of a Jeopardy! contestant. His confounding of prejudice is the thrust of this programme about him, but the presenter goes on to say:

I also got this accidental reflection on American capitalism, and how so many of us are served so poorly by the way life is currently set up as all work and no time. Jeopardy provided a very specific Ryan-shaped escape hatch. It gave him the space to stare into that crack between realities, and fish out all the elements of what his life could be.

We’re all too often told that work is liberating, that it’s what we have to do to “get ahead” but the rewards are often so low (and increasingly so) that all we get in exchange for our graft is our home and healthcare if we’re lucky. We do not generally find the time for personal improvement or to give anything worthwhile to our communities beyond the demands of capitalism.

This “accidental reflection” came about when interviewer asked Ryan if the prize money had made him happy.

It allowed me the opportunity to have time to […] examine myself, I guess. Just everything before, looking where I come from and what makes me tick. It’s a valuable thing. I think everybody needs to do it, but not everybody has time to do it. […] That’s the most valuable thing that I got out of this.

It’s an example of how a life-changing sum of money (though still not the millions of dollars some people imagine they’d need to retire) led to the buying of time to do the personal work, to take stock and come to terms with one’s emotions, to defrag, and see what’s going on with yourself.

No doubt Ryan will go back to work and maybe he still does a few rideshares even now, but the time he bought with the prize money allowed him to be himself for a while.

I wish more people had the chance to engage in this kind of reflection, for mental good health and for actively figuring out what to do next. We’re too often shoved around with no time–the naturally-occurring time of our lives–to spare. We’re told that Universal Basic Income (the provision of material basics for everyone, so that work becomes a consensual choice instead of wage slavery) would lead to personally unproductive or “immoral” slacking but Ryan, this clever everyman, joins a growing body of people who can show otherwise.

Tired of the everyday grind? Try The Good Life for Wage Slaves or I’m Out, both of which are available now in paperback.