Defying the Misery Index

Bad is in the eye of the beholder.

Janice and I have tooled around with the game Shit Happens. Here’s how you play.

(Apologies for the quality of these images, I took them while multitasking a bit. In case it’s not clear, the cards are: Disastrous Haircut, Root Canal, Locked out of Your House While Naked, and Catch Your Parents Having Sex.)

I have no doubt the contributors worked hard on ranking the trauma of each of these events. But in the end, I found the results questionable.

Let's take their top three (from the original 200-card set and the 100-card “full of shit” supplement):

The game instructs you to imagine the worst reasonable interpretation of each card, but there’s no way going blind is worse than being hijacked by Somali pirates. The chances are very high you will die from the hijacking. (Smallpox is another high scorer.)

Going blind is a big anxiety of mine. A lot of my lifestyle depends on my eyes, and you can see from this post alone that I love visual communication. (The little exclamation point in the Buried Alive illustration is a great touch.) And there are more and less traumatic ways to go blind: sometimes it's gradual enough that people can adjust more smoothly, whereas a friend of a friend had it happen due to an errant bungee cord hook.

Even so, there are many paths to a fulfilling life as a blind person and a much higher survival rate for that than for Somali hijacking or smallpox. The term “ableist” gets tossed around too much in certain social circles, but this ranking feels pretty ableist.

What about the other extreme?

Well, all of these are better than smallpox. But in my experience, a papercut hurts more than stepping on a Lego. And I prefer being on hold to either of those. Don't get me wrong: being on hold isn't an experience I relish, especially not when the company tries to fill my ears with promotional messages instead of simple, inoffensive hold music. (That doesn't work! The time to sell me a new service is not when I'm annoyed with you!) But I can just put the phone on speaker and go about my day.

I don't know which of us is wrong here, me or the card game, in terms of being at variance with the norm of human experience. I suspect we both are, but that I'm more wrong. If stand-up comedy is any guide, then I think most people would assign the experience of being on hold for a couple of hours higher than 2.0 rather than lower.

But I always get a little defiant about games like this and Family Feud, where the objective is to match the opinions of the general culture. I was brought up to think creatively, to think differently. Of course, we all have to anticipate the majority sometimes, but doing so in an oddball game feels like getting bad marks for failing to get the wrong answers.

But I'm not sure I’d assign that complaint a Misery Index number. It's not really that big a deal.