Yes, I’m in.
Not sure I could do it.
Sure! It might be kind of interesting, and I waste well over an hour a day doing mindless stuff on the Internet, so why not give it a try?
That said, I wouldn’t be willing to give up traveling for longer than a week for the duration of the challenge, and I’m not sure that I would realistically be able to keep it up while traveling, so I’d probably want to start right before I left on a trip just to make sure I didn’t sink too much time into something I wouldn’t complete.
I’m in but please don’t pay me in my country’s currency…
Maybe. At 4400 hours, it might be okay. I’d tackle it like a job and I could hack the delayed payment. Considering I pay taxes on my real income but get great benefits, the money would be in the same ballpark as my current job but I’m burned out and looking anyway, so this gives me a reason to quit. The time away from my actual career would likely mean I would struggle to restart it at my age, so I might have to slide into retirement when I was done.
If my sister, Ms. Frenetic and Cranky, joined me, I’d probably say yes. For her, it would be life changing money and snarking with her for a couple of years would strengthen our relationship. I’d try to recruit my brother too, even though he wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as a viewing companion. I might try to recruit way more of my extended family. My former sister in law and my niece could both use a half million and it’d be fun to watch with them too. My Dad would be less lonely sharing this viewing party than watching TV on the couch all day by himself.
I can live pretty comfortably on my pension. This is more money than I can earn at the job I have to supplement my pension. And it cuts out about 2 hours a day of commuting time. I’m in.
Solid Gold and Soul Train would be rough. I would have to break that up with the other shows. AB had a lot of garbage but also some interesting stuff. They even had the Dixie Dregs on once. Midnight Special I would watch for free but don’t tell my new employer that.
BTW, I love this hypothetical. It’s not legit torture, it’s not a ridiculous amount of money, and it doesn’t hurt other people.
Me, I wouldn’t do it unless I was already retired. Which means, count me in, I’ll just poke at the edges of the task until I do retire. Work takes up most of my day, and I’m not giving up huge chunks of my leisure time to watch old shows I never watched when they were new shows.
While I’d love to have the money, I don’t NEED the money.
I agree that this is a great hypothetical. It’s an amount of money we can mostly imagine having and we know what we’d do with it. It’s a task most of us can imagine attempting. (Some might enjoy it, others might hate it, but we have a grounding that yes, we understand it.) And yes, it doesn’t involve nasty ethical dilemmas.
I’d spend the first few weeks testing the specific limits of what triggers “not paying attention.” How often can I look away for a couple of minutes at a time before I have to rewind? Can I play on my steam deck at the same time? Can I have the show in a floating window on my desktop while I do other things? Can I put two monitors side by side and run a different television show simultaneously with the music? Can I play an audiobook while watching the show?
Exercise equipment would be mandatory, and significant research would go into discovering any and all activities that can be safely done while watching the show.
But without fighting the hypothetical, I assume this means “spend roughly 5000 hours giving your full, undivided attention to this media” and that would be tough for me since I very rarely give me full undivided attention to any media.
I’d still make a go at it but I think it would take me a very, very long time to get through it all - assuming I didn’t at some point accidentally go over my seven-day break limit. Probably 5+ years.
Recruiting family and friends would of course make it much much easier.
I imagine I could get a lot of endurance by trying to keep it instructional, like having a guitar with me to try and jam to all of the songs, trying to learn the dances, karaokying, making caricature Danny Terrio and Marylyn McCooo sketches, etc.