As I was out running the other morning, I started thinking about game shows and how frustrating they must be for a lot of the contestants. This didn’t come out of nowhere, by the way. Since the pandemic started The Bearded One and I have been going through the episodes of both Wheel of Fortune AND Jeopardy that are currently on Netflix. We’re both pretty good with words, and between us we have quite an array of extremely random pockets of knowledge. We each have some gaps, of course, but we’re pretty well matched in that we can fill in the blanks where the other isn’t familiar. Well, except in sports. We might be okay with general knowledge about sports, but anything about teams or players would be our one, collective Achilles heel in a trivia contest.
Anyway, as much as I dream about being on a game show (okay, mainly just Wheel of Fortune), I have this fear that I would be one of the unlucky ones for whom the experience is just a disappointment. It’s not always easy to get on these shows in the first place–trust me, I drove several hours once a couple of years ago when the Wheelmobile made a stop in Iowa. I waited in lines for several more hours, and still didn’t even get the chance to audition. But if you actually did make it on one of these shows, how excruciating would it be to spin the wheel, realize what the puzzle is before it stops spinning, and then have it land on Bankrupt. Or to know the question for every single answer in a Jeopardy category but never get to say any of them because the contestant standing next to you gets to her button first every.single.time. That kind of thing is what prompted my deep thoughts while running the other day. There was a contestant on an episode of Jeopardy we’d watched the night before who was pressing her button so aggressively that it was audible. I started paying attention, and she was trying on almost every one, but one of the other contestants always got to their button first. And after that, I started noticing the same thing happening quite a bit to other contestants too. And I think we’ve all probably seen those sad contestants who hit Bankrupt or Lose a Turn every time they get a chance to spin the Wheel.
And really, the older I get, the more I realize that’s just kind of how life is. You could be the perfect person for a job, but if you don’t see the ad until the day after applications were due, you don’t even get to apply. Or maybe after years of frivolous spending you finally made a plan to get your finances in order and then, just as you’re about to pay off that last credit card or student loan, a flood destroys your house and your insurance doesn’t cover damage from flooding, and suddenly you’re back at square one.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, and sometimes it will feel like someone else is getting all the luck. But there’s an old quote that I can’t seem to find a source for: “It seems the harder I work, the luckier I get.” I know that there are certainly systems of oppression in this society that serve as major obstacles for many people, and it’s easy for me to sit in my comfortable home with my comfortable job and my also gainfully employed partner and talk about “hard work”. I’m definitely not going to talk about “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”, because so many people in this country (and the world) would love to even just have a “pair of boots”. But I will say that most legitimately successful people I know and/or follow have worked really hard to get where they are. And that, when you’re working towards what you want, you’ll notice opportunities where you wouldn’t have if you weren’t out there doing the work. I guess I just want to encourage everyone (including myself) to work towards what you want because, if you do, no matter where you end up at least you’ll be closer to achieving your dreams than you would have been otherwise. And maybe you won’t ever win that Mini Cooper, or even make it to the Tournament of Champions, but at least you will have tried.
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