I am reminded of Shirley Jackson’s classic short story, “The Lottery,” in which the citizenry of a small town are all entered in an annual lottery, with the catch that the “winner” is stoned to death. But in Jackson’s story the lottery is compulsory, whereas we’re all signing up voluntarily for a chance to be, if not precisely stoned to death, then buried alive under our sacks of dough. It is tempting to believe that winning the lottery simply sets in motion an equal and opposite reaction: oh, how nice, you won tens of millions of dollars- so sorry about your dead son (a real life turn of events that happened to my former co-worker’s friend, and exactly the kind of anecdotal evidence about the lottery we are all privy to). Such a belief is grounded in devout bitterness, bitterness that is fed by the inevitable envy towards those who do win the lottery, and perversely, also fed when you learn of the winner’s equally inevitable demise, even if that demise is simply having a reputation as the world’s biggest rich asshole. Even though you rejoice that the winner’s life remains a piece of shit like your own, your bitterness only grows as you realize that should lady luck smile on you, the Lord nevertheless follows up the giveth with the taketh away, twisting life’s greatest mystery into the following: “Why do bad things happen to lucky people?”
Avoiding the temptation of this equal-and-opposite-reaction worldview requires that we re-inspect our notion of luck. Mega Millions is more like than unlike Jackson’s “Lottery” because the people who are lucky enough to be truly happy would never in a million years play Mega Millions. This means that every last one of the pool of potential Mega Millions winners is, to one degree or another, basically unhappy, at least in the moment they purchase their ticket. One of only two real changes that occurs for the Mega Millions winner is that he or she goes from being unhappy to being unhappy with money, the other change being that he or she never again has to worry about paying the bills or putting food on the table, which, while not insignificant, is, per the wisdom found in “Man does not live by bread alone,” not by itself enough to overcome a basic dissatisfaction with life. One who doubts that everyone who plays the lottery is to some degree basically unhappy must answer the question of why on earth a happy person would play the lottery. Doing so would be no different than deeply loving one’s spouse and then turning around and cheating on him or her. And infidelity, like playing the lottery, is born of dissatisfaction.
This second perspective, while discomforting to me as someone who occasionally plays the lottery (because really, what the bleep do I have to complain about re: my own circumstances, which are the only circumstances in question given that I’m certainly not playing the lottery while fantasizing about all the philanthropy I’m going to get up to. I should add, for the sake of clarity, that despite buying lottery tickets, I have never and would never cheat on my spouse, who is the main reason I am happy enough to buy lottery tickets so rarely, and, if I just opened my eyes a little wider, would keep me out of the checkout counter at Royal Farms for the rest of my life), has the advantage of nullifying the question of “Why do bad things happen to lucky people?” The truly fortunate are those lucky enough to realize how good they have it. But even these folk still face, at a minimum, old age, sickness, and death, which leaves us yet wondering “Why do bad things happen to good people?” If I can find just find an answer to that, I’ll make millions.
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