The Last Lottery Ticket
I bought my last lottery tickets this week. $6 spent on 1 chance each for Mega Millions, Powerball and Cash4Life. Hitting the jackpot (even after taxes) on any one of these would have provided enough cash to eliminate the need to work for the rest of my life and probably my kids’ lives and their kids’ lives too. But despite that allure—actually precisely BECAUSE of that allure—I am done.
I was not a habitual purchaser of these razor-slim chances of possessing all the wealth of an ancient Midas or last week’s GameStop millionaires. I would only buy tickets periodically—once every two or three weeks and always the same amount: $6. One chance to take home one of the three jackpots. Maybe—including times I spent a little more due to the preposterous size of the improbably huge payout— I spent $200 per year on lottery tickets. A small sum, spent on the infinitesimal chance that it might actually return a million-fold.
Intellectually, I was never in doubt about the nearly impossible chances of winning but I always rationalized it as “someone HAS to win and while its unlikely to be me, it definitely won’t be me if I am not in the mix”. But in my head, in the idle parts of my mind where daydreams grow like dandelions coming up through cracks in the sidewalk, I let my mind wander to dreams of unfathomable wealth. But in these daydreams, I was not a gilded fabulist—I was MUCH more discreet. The fantasy version of me played it cool, never wanting my new found riches to detract from the real me. My dreams tended towards real-estate. Rather than build a personal Versailles with my daydream fortune, in these fleeting dreams I bought or built understated homes on large pieces of property in all the places that hold a piece of my heart. Quiet, beautiful places with woods near water where it’s always serene and a big day is going for a hike or digging up a garden. And at each one of those homes, I would have a sensible, locale-specific vehicle in the garage. An Outback or an F-150, waiting for me to arrive. Because in these fantasies, there was inevitably a very posh roadster—a well-appointed, lightning fast sedan that would speed me from my equally understated home in NYC to any of the destinations in which I now owned a special, yet appropriately modest home. This all-too-visible shuttle between the city and country would be put in the garage immediately upon my arrival and swapped out for the more sensible car that would not draw attention around town.
I was definitely delusional but only for fleeting seconds at a time. But these and other similar scenarios would push themselves to the front of my brain, despite my rock-solid intellectual awareness that they would never come to pass as a result of purchasing this $6 “investment.”
But as of Monday January 25, 2021, I am done. Not because I can’t afford it or I have had a sudden epiphany that I will go to my grave never winning more than 4 bucks every few months. I’ve broken up with the lottery because the inevitable creep of unreality into my actual reality chips away at my “now.” Each flight-of-fantasy slightly degrades my ability to exist unfettered in the magnificently detailed present. To purchase these tickets—to “play the game” and “be in it to win it,” is a small insult to the richness of my immediate existence. Each dark pink, black and white ticket was a gnat buzzing near my ear, drawing my focus away from engaging with the moment right at hand.
On their own, each distraction is meaningless and in isolation might be forgotten. Taken together over a lifetime, though, with the same theme pinging around my brain, these moments add up. At 30 seconds a day, its over 2 hours a year.
2 hours of distraction plus whatever time it took to get back on task. What one could do with 2 hours over the course of the year? 2 hours of time combined with a $200 expense on lottery tickets comes out to a very nice dinner, deeply connecting and making memories with real people whom I love. It’s an amazing workout session with a coach when I might make a meaningful breakthrough in my health and fitness. Or its just $200 saved and time to do things like create, think and share. The opportunity cost of that seemingly innocent “in it to win it” mentality is the subtle, almost imperceptible erosion of meaningful parts of my life.
But even the money and opportunity cost isn’t the point. The point is the present, living in the now unburdened by the drogues of the past or the siren call of futures that will never be. Our senses and attention are regularly besieged for attention by so much beyond our control. When those elements are in our control, like my innocent purchase of lottery tickets, it serves us well to cut them our so we can fully attend to the multi-faceted beauty of our reality. Even in our dark moments-and certainly we have had many during this time of social unrest and disease-our reality is much more deserving of our attention than the idle fantasies supplied by the local lottery agent.
So, I have given up lottery tickets: they are one more distraction, one more eddy of current trying to push me off course and wasting time that will always be too precious to loose.
