Why I Play the Lottery

My wife and I will do just about anything for each other. We have a great relationship and complement each other’s strengths. I fold the laundry. She puts it away. I do the grocery shopping. She puts the groceries away. I clean the bathrooms while she does the floors.

I know that I can ask my wife to run almost any errand and she will cheerfully tell me that she will be happy to do so. There is only one thing that I can ask my wife to do that will cause her to look troubled and to tell me that she won’t do it for me. She will not buy my lottery tickets. More than that, she will not buy my lottery tickets and she will tell me thats because only losers buy lottery tickets — I am a loser when I buy them!

Now, I truly value my wife’s opinion. More often than not, if my wife takes the time to express an opinion, she is usually “spot on” in her assessment. Nevertheless, despite my wife’s views on the subject, I still go to the grocery store twice per week to buy my Florida Lotto tickets.

I am sure many of my readers share my wife’s view. Whether I spend $1 per week or $5 per week, chances are very good that I am voluntarily giving money to the State of Florida. The odds of winning are not huge and over time — about 24 years since I started playing the lottery — that weekly payment adds up.

I know that I probably won’t win — but I might. It is worth a few dollars a week to sustain that hope of winning a jackpot big enough to allow me to retire or to allow me to do more. It is worth a couple of trips to the store each week, just so that maybe, I can someday win enough money to give my wife all of the things that I want to give her, but cannot.

It’s not that I am not successful. I have been quite successful over the past several years. Unfortunately, I have also seen that there are not too many people my age who “hit the jackpot” at work and can walk away with fabulous wealth. I am in my 40’s, and that usually means that if I have not hit the jackpot yet, and I cannot see a jackpot on the immediate horizon, I am going to need a little bit of luck to realize all of the goals that I set for myself when I was getting out of college in the 1980’s.

My wife, wise woman that she is, views my perspective on being too old to earn fabulous money by working as both ridiculous and depressing. From her perspective, we make our own fortunes and we are never too old to make it “big.” I don’t completely disagree with her. At the same time, I like to think that by playing my numbers week after week and year after year, I am making my own luck. If I never win, I can console myself that my lottery payments are a voluntary contribution to the school budgets of the state of Florida. If I do win, I am pretty sure my wife will stop considering the lottery as a game for losers.

What do you think? Do you play the lottery? Do you think you play it too much? Have you ever won? Or do you share my wife’s view and think that the lottery is for losers?