Lottery Tickets

We humans, for all of our achievements, ain't real bright. We downward traverse slick, snowy mountainsides on two even slicker blades or a wheel-less skateboard at high speeds -- and no brakes -- for essentially no reason. We ingeniously hide our keys and wallets in our shoes on the beach -- undoubtedly the first place a beach-wandering thief would look -- while a football field away we splash around in the ocean, home to jellyfish and sharks. We stand out on our porches or by glass windows during a tornado so that we can capture footage of consummate devastation on our ironically named smartphones. Oh, and we buy fireworks. Basically we do the mental math to determine percentage-wise how bad of a decision a singular action is -- and then we put a helmet on and say, "Screw it."

But how dumb are we really? Well, we play the lottery. Picked numbers, scratch-offs, pull tabs... it doesn't matter. We just like to test the odds. Those immoderate, insurmountable odds. Yes, even I, your finger-wagging blogger, occasionally dabble in the capricious frivolity that is scratch-offs. Maybe, maybe even a pull tab. There's just something about scratching away or pulling open to reveal a formerly concealed picture or message (even if, say, "You suck, try again") that human beings inherently dig. It's why we have advent calendars.

I think what gets lost among all the lottery noise, especially among Powerball, is that you're playing the pre-authenticated odds of the game itself, not the odds of the other players. For example, you are just as virtually hopeless to win the Powerball if you were the only player on Earth as you are with a million other players who have purchased a billion other tickets. The odds don't change based on participant pool -- more people playing may mean you get fewer weeks before someone wins, but those numbers you selected based on your birthday, horoscope, and body measurements hold the same .00000000007 chance of sending you to an early retirement if no one else played. Sorry, kid.

The people who wait until the lottery jackpot is nine figures before deciding to play particularly intrigue me. We've all heard this retarded retort before from that buddy who suddenly decided to buy a Powerball ticket for the first time: "I never play, but, you know, the jackpot is $180 million now." Doesn't the Powerball jackpot reset to $20 million after each big win? As in, $20 million is the absolute bare minimum amount a Powerball jackpot winner can be awarded? Yeah, pretty sure that's true. Guess I wasn't aware $20 million was such a feeble flaming bag of poo for a one-dollar gamble. But, see, $20 million isn't enough for these people to play; such an ineffectual, lackluster prize purse is only good enough for, like, six lives of worriless comfort. No, what these folks so reasonably require is at least 40 lives' worth. Count these people out until they know those hard-earned stakes can buy them more Bugattis than merely one for every day of the week. I mean, what kind of ROI is $20 million on a buck anyway? Inconsequentially anticlimactic, obviously.

Regardless of the exact enormity of millions rendered, we all know how it ends for the winners. And for several reasons it's usually not good. The story is mostly the same: family, friends, exes, enemies, and strangers all come out of the woodwork abruptly needing cash; Nicholas Cage-like spending habits quickly develop; and all privacy, and thus trust, is lost, only to be replaced by loneliness and an attic of Sharper Image crap. Years later in where-are-they-now interviews, the winners disclose that winning the lottery was quite possibly the worst thing that ever happened to them. And then we the general public, a.k.a. the lottery losers, empathize and wish them well. ...Wait, no, scratch that -- we loathe them. We curse their indiscretion and swear that we'd be better, smarter winners. We'd pay off debts, we'd help others out, we'd invest in the future. Because we're responsible. We're smarter.

So responsible and smart, in fact, that we go back out the next day and purchase more lottery tickets.