Winning the Lottery
I would guess that it is a vast minority of people who haven’t fantasized about winning the lottery. (And I’d further speculate that this would consist mainly of those who, somehow or other, never heard of it to begin with.) After all, what would (seemingly) be a more sure-fire, effort-free, way to solve your biggest problems in an instant? Winning the lottery could mean, for instance, never having to work at some job you hate, or even moderately dislike, ever again.
That’s worth repeating:
NO STUPID JOB. EVER AGAIN.
I’d be willing to wager the price of one SuperLotto or MegaMillions ticket that that thought alone is enough to elicit a huge smile on your face, if not fill you with tears of unmitigated joy.
And yet — on a deeper level we (sort of) understand that winning the lottery wouldn’t really be the panacea we imagine it would. Perhaps we have read about those studies that conclude that, after six months or so, lottery winners return to right around the same levels of happiness they had before winning. We may even have heard tales of people who squandered all of their winnings (and then some), or otherwise ended up much worse off than they were prior to winning — that winning the lottery had, in fact, ruined their lives.
Even so, we’re quite sure that such a fate would not befall us in the same…
