The Psychological Reason Why You Should Never Play the Lottery

I was an avid lottery player. I couldn’t see a downside; a couple of quid a week and the chance to win once in a while, maybe even hit the jackpot. It'd run the numbers and it was worth the gamble, or so I thought.

When some curmudgeon said “I wouldn’t want to win the lottery because it would ruin my life” I thought, if you’re that worried about it pal, give the whole lot to charity.

Yet I now understand playing the lottery is one of the worst things you can do. It has nothing to do with the big win, it's about what it does to your perceptions, your peace and your happiness, right here and now.

Each time you play the lottery, you're making a mental statement about your life to yourself. You're saying "Things right now could be better" and "I'm waiting to start my life with this big win".

Whether you like it or not, playing the lottery divides your life into the "lacking" present and the glorious, abundant future. It's a subconscious declaration that says “I am treading water now but I can start living when that big win comes in."

This is what the lottery does to your mindset

We all know money doesn’t make people happy, the data is in, that’s clear. But concerns about playing the lottery aren't about money, they're about mindset.

The false hope of the lottery can make you miss happiness now.

Your current reality, no matter how rosy it is, no matter how content you may feel, can never, ever compete with a fantasy future.

Nothing real can compete with a "what if".

A relationship can be ruined if you’re always looking for someone a bit more perfect, a bit more to your liking, but life is also a relationship between you and reality. Playing the lottery distracts from what you have and puts your attention squarely on what you don’t have unless your numbers come up.

Playing the lottery is leaning into a mindset of lack.

Ok, so it’s easy — nay, unavoidable — to fantasise about a life of contentment in a big house with no hassles, but that's all it is, a fantasy. Life's problems never go away. A lottery win won't remove your problems, it will just exchange them for new ones.

Life's challenges are not nuisances that will one day be brushed aside, there is no easy life, there is no easy path, it doesn't exist. Life comes with struggle built-in. You and I live that reality one way or another every day. And those every days become every years. If we begrudge or resist the hassles, the inconveniences, if we dismiss the frustrations of daily living as something we can pay to get rid of, then we are dismissing our lives.

Buddha said “Life is suffering”

It’s difficult to disagree, he was a pretty insightful chap, all things considered. The struggle, the grind, is the human condition. Life is a process, it isn’t a utopian, sun-drenched destination.

To struggle is to be alive.

When I was young, I asked my mother if she'd rather be poor and happy or rich and miserable. We were an impoverished family and money was a constant stress. She replied, “rich and miserable, thanks”.

This answer blew me away. It seemed crazy, but the reality was she didn’t want to be miserable, she, like everyone else, thought it would be possible to use thd money to work out how to be happy, that she could buy happiness.

Money is important, don't get me wrong. As Les Brown said, it's right up there with oxygen in terms of importance. Poverty creates misery, hardship, addiction, but this doesn't mean riches create the opposite. No one walks into a room ecstatic the oxygen ratio is way higher than normal. Similarly, no one remains ecstatic they have millions, reality normalises and they fall back to their default level of happiness based on their internal robustness.

All external stimuli, including money, promise happiness but cannot deliver. Happiness must come from within. Ultimately, riches cannot guarantee anything more than an initial and ever-decreasing high.

Look, you know this, I'm not revealing anything new, but it is the cognitive dissonance between this innate truth and our desire for a lottery win that is worth familiarising yourself with.

This is a mental trap we all fall into. It's not winning the lottery that can ruin your life (though it might), it's playing the lottery that's the problem, it's the thief of joy, the distraction from our real lives.

Happiness is a second-hand emotion, a side effect of how we choose to live, how we choose to perceive our lives and ourselves. It is found in gratitude and forgiveness, manifested by progress and personal achievement, embedded in helping others and feeling worthy. Happiness can only be generated in ourselves and by how we think and act.

As author Louise Hay wrote:

“Life is a lottery that we've already won. But most people have not cashed in their tickets.”

We are the filter between ourselves and happiness. Nothing else.

We have to cultivate happiness inside simply because it cannot be gifted to us through external stimuli like a lottery win or a double whisky.

So I stopped playing. I stopped ignoring (and worse, hating) what I had in my life. I realised that with every blessing comes a burden, hidden within every pressure is a privilege, so I decided to go easy on my struggles because they come with gifts.

Most of all, I took the responsibility for my happiness out of the hands of chance and put it back onto me. This was my declaration to the universe I am responsible for my happiness and no one else.

It’s a scary thought, but it’s also one of true emancipation. I stopped waiting to be handed happiness and peace and started working on it myself. It all started by stopping entering the lottery.