Board Games, Escape Rooms, and Effort for Effort’s Sake

America’s professional class has a chill deficit

Why does the professional class love effort for the sake of effort?

I ask this is a card carrying member of the professional class, myself.  Or, at least as card carrying as it gets–I think I have an expired ABA Membership card somewhere.  I have an AmEx.  I’m pretty sure I have at least a dozen old loyalty cards in my wallet for various gyms, health clubs, and floufy grocery stores.  I have every boring color of Patagonia vest.  I’m pretty firmly entrenched in the bourgeoisie, albeit at the poorer end of things.

But good Lord.  The effort for the sake of effort…

The escape rooms.  The meal subscription boxes that cost more than dinner out, and save a person a trip to the grocery store, but in turn, require six hours of preparation, four hours of cook time, twenty six pots, and thirty two pans.  The board games with fourteen pages of instructions.  The 5Ks.  The half marathons.  The full marathons. The Peletons.  The book clubs.  The intensive parenting.  The intensive dog ownership.  The intensive houseplant ownership.  

I get tired just thinking about it.

My greatest goal in life is to not have to work so hard.

Seriously.  If I ever win the lottery, I’m turning into Honey Boo Boo’s mom, but without the pageants.  I’m never getting off my ass again.  I’m going to have takeout every single night for the rest of my life.  When I get too fat, I’m just going to go in for lipo.  Maybe take up crack.  It worked for Hunter Biden.  Forget thinking; I’ll hire other people to do that crap for me. 

Sure, I put in lots of effort at things right now, but that’s only because I have to.

I bag my own groceries at ALDI because I’m too cheap to have my groceries delivered. I think all day because that’s what I get paid to do.  I walk several miles a day because it’s barely socially acceptable to be fat or poor, much less both.  

Crack would be easier, but I can’t afford grocery delivery, so I sure as hell can’t afford crack.        

I don’t have any kids.  I don’t have any pets.  I never bothered to learn my first husband’s birthday.  Pretty sure it was in September.  He replaced the houseplants for me every time one died, which was constantly.  He also did all of the cleaning.  And made all of the dinner arrangements.  My job was to build the beer can towers after I got off work; I created some real marvels of engineering with empty Busch cans.  

Beyond that, anybody wants me to think after hours? I better be getting paid time and half.  No way I’m paying money to have to do more damn work.  

The other day, I read a mind-numbing essay from a WashU professor, talking about why a computer game involving a goose was problematic.  It was awful.  It was like the worst of academic writing had a bastard child with the worst of pop psychology.  I normally think that abortion is a tragedy, but not in this case—that bastard child of an essay definitely should have been aborted.  I would have taken off work to drive that essay across the damn river, myself.  

But also, bro was complaining about the wrong thing.

Think helping an animated goose wreak havoc is too much like errands?  Well guess what—there are worse things in life than errands. Like the jobs a person has to work in order to have the money to run those errands.  

At the core of any typical white collar job, there are three main tasks:  (1) Memorizing a bunch of arbitrary rules and forms that have no natural tie to anything a normal person would do under normal, non-job circumstances, (2) strategizing how to best complete aforementioned tasks according to the arbitrary rules provided, and (3) having one’s train of thought disrupted every five seconds by other people.  

This basically defines 99.9% of all desk jobs.   

Game nights do a nearly perfect job of re-creating this.

There are roughly 37,945,186 board games on the market targeted at adults 13+.  These board games contain, on average, 13 pages of instructions apiece.  The typical upper middle class household owns between 15-60 of these games.  There are one or two best sellers, but beyond that, no one game is any more likely to be found in a given household than any other, so within a circle of say, eight friends, it’s not unlikely that a person could encounter as many as 400 of these such games. 

Four hundred. 

Each with a separate set of pointless and arbitrary rules.  Each with different and often conflicting strategies.

That’s a lot of dumb shit to learn.

But of course, a person doesn’t play these games in a vacuum any more than he compiles expense reports in one.

No, the whole idea of game night is that it’s supposed to be a social activity.

A person is supposed to learn these stupid rules and develop these stupid strategies while also being a polite conversationalist.  A person has to figure out something good to say about Todd’s grocery shopping story, endure Rachel’s humblebrag, compliment Emily’s new haircut, congratulate Blake on his fifth illegitimate child, and keep an eye on whether anybody needs help making another cocktail while also memorizing the 15 pages of rules to a game about wizards.  

And this crap starts early.

Well before people settle into game nights, there are the drinking games.

So many drinking games.

Each with a trillion pointless rules of their own.

Because apparently getting drunk without a set of written instructions is just too difficult.  

Or too easy.  

I’m not sure.  All I know is that if a person needs that much help figuring out how to get bombed, there might be a problem.  

I’m not a real genius at decision making, but I can generally figure out how to best drink beer without the help of a card deck and a list of 47 rules scribbled onto poster board by a guy named Chad. 

But uh, guess I’m the outlier there.   

In all, this upper middle class obsession with rules for the sake of rules; effort for the sake of effort is just a chance to cosplay the most frustrating aspects of corporate life on one’s own time and dime, but with alcohol.  

Maybe.  

Hopefully.  

Unless a critical mass of adults have decided to try sobriety that week, in which case it’s literally just Mastercard’s corporate office, but in a house with subway tile, and no paycheck to show for all of the misery.

Now, I don’t say this in an effort to be crass or curmudgeonly.

Well, perhaps a bit curmudgeonly.

But I love my friends dearly.  

If there’s one thing the last three years have reinforced for me, it’s how important nights with friends are. 

Also, I’m bad about never planning anything ever.  The worst game night is still going to be lightyears ahead of the absolutely nothing I have planned.

But still, why?  

Why are there so many board games? Why do 20 year olds need drinking games? Why do people go to escape rooms voluntarily?  Do…do dogs really need braces and teeth whitening treatments?  Why am I supposed to spend $100 on HelloFresh when takeout exists?  

Is life not hard enough, as is?

And perhaps more importantly, does every activity have to be so structured?  

How hard is it to just…hang out?  

Sure, there might be an awkward minute of trying to find something to watch, and there might be a couple of moments of trying to find something to say, but that’s not the end of the world.  And moreover, board games don’t prevent this.  

Escape rooms don’t prevent this. 

The awkwardness of life cannot be escaped; it cannot be planned into oblivion.  Escaping a pirate-themed room in a strip mall is one thing, escaping oneself is another. No box from HelloFresh will ever fix a broken relationship; it will never, in and of itself, give two people anything more meaningful to discuss than “Will you pass the lettuce (dumbass)?”

Sometimes life just is awkward.  Hanging out with other people can be uncomfortable. That’s…all part of the deal.  

The only real options are to either accept this, or spend the rest of one’s life alone. 

And the latter seems like an awfully steep price to pay for avoiding a few minutes of embarrassment.