I Would Probably Play the Squid Game

In the aftermath of the hit Netflix series Squid Game, websites popped up with quizzes where you can see if you would survive the brutal game. This is more horrifying than the show, because it hides savagery behind a veneer of entertainment, which is something the show doesn’t do. The messages of Squid Game are as subtle as a sledgehammer.

And yet, here I am pondering the circumstances that would lead me to making that fateful phone call. The kind of circumstances that hover at the edge of my vision of the future, just a little out of reach, but far too close for comfort. The kind of circumstances that are held at bay mostly by optimism rather than reality.

We’re a nation full of desperate people. A lot of that desperation is quiet. It’s embarrassing and shameful to talk about the reasons we’re so desperate for money. And money is what everything boils down to. The creditors waiting in the wings want money. The healthcare providers want money for things we can’t really afford, but can’t afford to go without. Our jobs don’t pay enough of it, and emergencies suck up the little we save.

If you haven’t seen the show, all you need to know is that the vast majority of the hundreds of players are desperate for money and the prize for winning the game is millions of dollars. It’s easy in the beginning to blame the players for their own bad choices leading them into this kind of misery. We love to do that in our society. Point out the bad choices of others so we can feel smug about our own lives and have a reason to not have to feel empathy or be helpful.

As the show goes on, we come to realize that there are people who made the best choices available to them while playing the shitty hand dealt to them in a game they had no control over. The point is that it’s easy to judge from a place of comfort, but there are always things going on behind the scenes and in the human heart that we’re not aware of.

What It Would Take

Let me get this out of the way. No, I don't want to kill anyone. In my quasi-fantasy I've teamed up with other good people and we win the game as a team and split the winnings. Our opponents were not so good people, and we all knew how it ends.

Of course that's not how the game works. Not in the fantasy world of a streaming show or in the real world. I mean, okay, yes, the real world game kills people, but more by indifference than outright violence. I've read complaints that the show is too bloody. Too unnecessarily violent. I think that's what it takes to make some people understand that this is how it feels out here for a lot of us.

Would I play the game tomorrow? No. I still have hope. Can I envision that hope running out? Yes. Easily.

I just wrote three long paragraphs laying out in detail all of the financial reasons and life circumstances that led me here, to this place where I’m contemplating the reality of playing a brutal game that would likely be the death of me. Literally. I deleted those paragraphs because in the end, it doesn’t matter. At least, not to you.

I’m a rational human being. I’ve made good choices and bad. I’ve survived abuse and poverty. I’ve done the best I can. That’s not going to be enough to survive old age. So, there will come a tipping point when I find, as most of the Squid Game players do, that nothing out there is worse than what’s inside the game. It’s just more visceral and immediate, playing for money or death stakes.

Out here in the real world we’re playing for the same stakes. It’s just a longer game.