I ultimately don't care that much about the lottery, after all it's a game with negative expected value—how else would the organizers make money otherwise?—and the time spent playing it, as well as the hope you put into something totally out of your control, make it not worth it to me. If other people play it, fine they are just engaging in a stupid activity, it's not like those don't exist anywhere else, such as watching sports, scrolling social media or niche hobbies such as collecting stamps.
But I do wonder what it is exactly that drives people to think that it is a good usage of their time. The surface answer, which has some validity, is that people are simply irrational and do not consider the fact that the lottery has negative expected value for them. I can see that, after all, knowing something and deeply understanding it is another thing altogether. It's one thing to know about compounding effects in life, not just of compounding interests, but also in how your energy, relationships, environment and work ethic can compound positively or negatively, and it's another thing to live a life trying to create and maintain positive feedback loops. For instance, most people do not treat their health seriously because they only see it as some kind of fixed state in time, they do not see how it could give them energy to do more things over time.
So okay, people are irrational, or at least they do not seriously consider what it means for something to be of negative expected value. But this doesn't convince me too much because the most notable examples of lottery players in my own life are people in their 40s or 50s who hold technical jobs, in the realm of programming mainly. These people clearly took basic classes on statistics, they know what an expected value is, and they probably know how to think in terms of incentive structures. Why would lottery organizers go through the hassle of gathering money, creating tickets and finding sellers, if the whole thing didn't earn them more money than it cost them?
It's obvious when we reason with our mind, but of course, what drives most decisions are emotional.
My conclusion is that the lottery is played by people who have utterly given up on creating opportunities in their own life. In other words, it's learned helplessness. You could argue that the main emotional appeal is the massive, and thus life-changing, reward which comes from winning the lottery. Those who play it fantasize about not having to work for the rest of their life, and having the time to do whatever they want. Of course that's very real, after all we do not consider rewards and risks symmetrically, and the appeal of winning big without having to put in a whole lot of work is very strong in humans.
But still, why is it that lottery players default to a game totally dependent on chance to improve their life situation? Again my answer is that it boils down to learned helplessness. Another thing I notice about the lottery players around me—the sample size is ridiculously small but this is my writing, I extrapolate as I want—is that they're middle-aged people who by and large have a life that is fairly "fixed". They have been doing the same job for 8, 12, 15 years perhaps, they have settled into a house, and a wife, and when they come home they watch the same set of programs on TV, again and again.
Given such a level of routine and consistency in their life, it kind of makes sense to spend money on something that gives them variance, because it seems to me that they expect their current life to essentially be the same right up until they retire.
So the way I see it is that they've basically decided, unconsciously of course, that their current circumstances are what they are, and that they are not willing to put more work to change their life outside of their job. I sort of understand that, because as you get older, you obviously have far more responsibilities, starting with children and your partner of course, and add to that diminishing energy levels and I can see why someone would not be too keen on looking for more opportunities in their life. Enough is enough at some point.
But still, it is also sad to see someone buy again and again a lottery ticket, knowing that it will never make a difference. And the few ones who are lucky enough to win it are so irresponsible that they do not keep the earnings for very long. After all, managing money is another skill, and if you suddenly were to earn millions, if not hundreds of millions with the biggest lotteries, it's not surprising that most would waste it away on frivolous stuff and not know how to spend it in a sustainable way that also brings them fulfillment.
I have found it crucial to surround myself with people who are proactive with their life, whether it is their life, their work situation, the people they engage with, their habits, their emotional patterns, and how they use their time and attention. I notice that those people tend to have a much healthier relationship to risk, where they are very willing to take risks—as long as they don't come with life-threatening costs—which can bring them more opportunities, whether through learning or connecting with others.
This is to say that you can try 100 things and not get anything directly out of them, but if you hone valuable skills in the meantime, then those 100 attempts were a valuable source of risk. From this I notice that school actually instills in people a mindset which is antipodal to real learning. In school you are in a fixed environment, through no choice of your own, and have to take tests to grade you from 0 to 100 let's say. You have to take those tests until you pass them, and after that, you are "done".
In real life, you have the ability to change your environment, and how many "tests" you are taking so to speak. You can keep trying and trying, and if you have the resources to stay in the game, and you find that you are learning valuable things, this can be very worthwhile. And even if all you get in terms of results are scores in the range of 0 to 10, you might eventually "score" a "test" that lands in the 1000s, because there is no upper bound to real life, as opposed to schooling.
To put this in real life terms, someone can keep trying at their creative endeavors, let's say writing, and publish novels or non-fiction books with very few people to read them. But then, eventually, one of those books might become big, a "score" of a 1000, which gives them enough funding to not think too much about money for the coming 10 years.
This would seem to the lottery players to be a more convoluted form of the game they play. Success, they might say, is just like a game of chance. No doubt that there are factors outside of your control when it comes to creative endeavors, but also, there are many key differences. The first one of course is that how much money you need to cover your expenses is in many aspects within your control. People who can live frugally have a much easier time meeting their needs, which means you don't need to win the equivalent of the lottery to be a full-time creative.
The second one is that every thing you write, illustrate or compose adds to your experience and your skills as a creative, whereas lottery tickets do not grow you in any shape or form. The third one is that putting things out there can allow you to find other people who are doing similar things, leading to exchanges that might help you figure out how to move past your problems, or simply friendships based on shared interests.
And lastly, to come back to the initial subject, working to create things you are interested in gets you out of the learned helplessness of modern society, which starts all the way back in school. It is the fixed environment which you have to contort yourself within which is at the root of schooling, not any of the content that you learn there. In other words, whether teachers and school directors realize it or not, the main lesson you learn in school is how to be someone who obeys to rules, not how to learn or think for yourself.
Perhaps you still think that making money as a creative is largely down to luck, but it's undeniable that whatever sensitivities and skills you cultivate in the process of making art are carried with you in all aspects of life. Before I started drawing, I don't think I ever spent much time looking deeply at people's faces, but now I am fascinated by how the exterior world—people's appearances, their posture, their gait—reflects their interior. Some people hold a sense of defeat in their entire body, through a contracted posture, rounded shoulders, avoidant gaze, uncertaint gait, whereas others carry a soft but vibrant confidence in them, interested in whatever is in front of them, and always ready to adapt their plans if things don't work out the way they wanted to.
All this to say that there are activities worth doing even if they come with no financial rewards, though they might if you so wish, and others which only promise financial rewards but even then are not worth doing. The lottery is for people who have given up on building their own life.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Distraction Helplessness Opportunity Uncertainty Risk Education
2025-08-24