One Year In Solitary Confinement For $30 Billion Sounds Miserable

While politicians are busy arguing over voting rights bills and how to squeeze the typical working man by the day, the social media world has been rocked by the one year of solitary confinement in return for $30 BILLION dollars challenge.

The rules, as set by the Twitter user responsible for this phenomenon, call for "no books, movies, phones, consoles, NOTHING."

365 days in a padded room.

Can you do it?

The initial response out of many solitary confinement experts is "HELL YES, I CAN DO THAT!"

Let's remember, you get nothing but food, I assume. You don't leave the room and the guards aren't bringing you anything to take your mind off of another day starring at padded walls.

In a 2020 report from The New Republic, author Arthur Longworth wrote about how to survive it at supermax prison facilities inside the United States.

"You regiment your day. You create and continually reinvent a routine. And you stick to it. You pace the bounds of the cell: three and a half steps in one direction, three and a half steps back," Longworth writes.

"You keep moving. When the cellblock floods and the cell floor is beneath several inches of water—which happens regularly because it’s one of the few forms of protest possible—you slog through it. When the floor isn’t covered with water, you break up your pacing with pushups and sit-ups.

"You ration books. You get two a week—random paperbacks of a guard’s choosing."

Ahh, but in the theoretical Twitter solitary confinement, you don't get two books a week. You get NOTHING.

While your brain wastes away from lack of reading or writing, the body is busy wasting away.

"If you went into IMU strong and healthy, that’s not the way you’re going to stay. You don’t get enough vitamins and calories, fresh air, sunlight, or anything else necessary for health," Longworth notes.

"You grow anemic, jittery, skeletal. Unless you stop moving—in which case you become doughy, pallid, frail. You do what you can to care for your health, and you don’t sweat what you can’t. It’s not your body that’s going to get you through the experience—if, indeed, you do get through it."

Before you start thinking that Longworth is just some journalist who doesn't know what he's talking about, you need to understand that Arthur Longworth was first arrested when he was 13. By 20, Arthur was arrested for attempted robbery and murder which resulted in a life without parole sentence.

Now 57, Longworth has been writing on prison for years and is considered a go-to expert on the subject.

So just how do you survive 365 days?

"You have to cache some kind of hope, purpose, or meaning inside yourself to bear the experience of the cell," he writes. "It is so excruciating, it feels as though nothing else exists."

Longworth says that even after you survive solitary, "natural light will feel like a shank stabbing into your skull." Vertigo will happen. Your body will be brittle and "you feel as though you'll topple over."

There will be shaking, tremors, violent retching. Your appearance will turn into that of someone who spent time in a concentration camp.

But there's that $30 BILLION waiting at the end of it all. Surely the money will ease the pain, right?

Longworth writes in his New Republic piece, clearly well before the 365 for $30 BILLION challenge was conjured up, that people won't "understand what happened to you in that place still happens every day."

Still think you could do it?

I'm out. There would be only so much imaginary Tic-tac-toe that could be played on those walls. And what good is $30 billion after getting out if your mind is as warped as Longworth claims? Does money help solve mental issues? You'd have all this money and then have your family members constantly begging for a piece of the pie. It would never be enough.

I'll just keep playing the lottery when it gets to $700 million so I have enough to live comfortably after taxes. The rest of you can have the padded wall room.