Gambles

Usually what gamblers regret the most isn’t the loss of their money so much as the loss of their insane hopes.”

– Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

We like to dream. To fantasize about a life where we have no worries, no stress, where we can do whatever we want. To be free in every sense of the word. The lottery conjures up such fantasies. They accompany not only purchased lottery tickets, but the mere mention of a jackpot. The idea that a large chunk of money is up for grabs will do that to people. And it’s not just lottery tickets, but gambling in any sense. Games of chance, the stock market, get rich quick schemes. They’re all capable of planting that little seed of an idea in our mind that we could have it all, and that we don’t have to do much to get it. So long as we can shell out the cost to play we could—could—make some money. The trouble comes when that could becomes a certainty in our minds.

With every thought about riches, the fantasy becomes less and less a dream, and more and more our destiny. The seed takes root. Those promising the pay off—casinos, lottery funds, multi-level marketers who signed up a couple months before you—they’re particularly skilled at expediting this process. Armed with stories, images, and other gimmicks, they’ll guarantee that you will fulfill your destiny, so long as your credit card clears, of course.

But such dreams seldom come to fruition.

Sure, we could get rich at the roulette table, but the attendant can easily rake your chips away after one bad spin. We could turn our savings into a fortune with the right investment, but if we have no idea how to invest wisely we end up with a certificate for some company that went broke. And yes, we could scrape together all that remains on our credit cards to buy into some multi-level marketing scheme, but without actually knowing what to do we could lose it all. And that’s it, we’re back where we were at the beginning, just with less in our bank account. So we vow to never undertake such an endeavour again because it’s simply throwing our money away.

We’ve all been there. But that’s not the real lesson. The real lesson is to not allow yourself to be swept up by that which is not reality. For, as the quote that begins this pieces states, it isn’t so much the losing the money the gets us, it is losing the dream. Losing the money does not help, but the real reason we feel so down is we thought things were going to change. We believed it, with every fibre of our being. 

So we should be reminded of what Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”