I won the Lottery!
Just kidding. I didn’t.
In fact, no one did. Again. Most Saturday mornings there is a little clip running on the newsfeed on the bottom of the TV screen on the CBC or CTV news channel:
“No winning ticket for last night’s $50M LottoMax draw.”
Then later in the week, we will be bombarded with ads for next week’s draw: “More $1M draws added!” Good, I guess. It’s better to win 1 million than 50 million anyway, at least according to a study by researchers at Vanderbilt University, the University of Kentucky and the University of Pittsburgh. They correlated that the more money you win in the lottery, the more likely you are to end up bankrupt. Yup, that’s what they studied and determined. Well, the Tragically Hip already knew that when the late Gord Downie sang it to us : “The smaller it gets, the further it’s gotta go, when you’re blowin’ high dough..”
As for me, I don’t buy lottery tickets. It’s not that I’m some kind of saint – I do visit my Quebec Casino to donate my voluntary tax money. Occassionally I win enough to buy a fancy cocktail at the plushy bar where I will enjoy the blingy colour and pingy sounds in this den of sin. It’s an enjoyable afternoon from time to time. But lottery tickets? Statistically, no one ever wins. At least not last night. “But someone’s gotta win,” people argue. No, they don’t gotta. In fact, no one did, again, last night. But don’t worry, someone will eventually – its’s just that they’ll have to rebuy tickets to get that new chance. A chance that again, statistically speaking, isn’t even going to happen!
Do you buy lottery tickets? Why or why not?
Stevie Szabad, Author 