Winning the $900 million Powerball would be a special kind of hell
“I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.”
— Mark Twain
Tonight, Jan. 9, 2016, millions of people across 44 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands will hold their collective breath and stare in desperate-hopeful expectation at a set of little plastic balls. It’s Powerball drawing day and the jackpot at stake will be the largest in the lottery game’s 34-year history, a Queenly sum of $900 million dollars.
Good Lord, that really is a lot of money. We’re talking more than three quarters of a billion dollars. Forget “fuck you money,” this is “operating budget of a small nation state” money. Forget a mega-yacht, you can buy your own small navy. And all you have to do is pony up $2 for a ticket? Think about how all that cash could change your life.
Believe me, I have. And I am definitely not playing.
Handing me $900 million dollars would be like strapping a jet engine on a hang glider.
Why abstain? It’s not about the odds or the “rationality” of playing. Sure, it’s still a one in about 300 million chance of winning the pot, and worse, I think, if you hope to keep it all to yourself and not split it with other winners. In fact, the last time the pot was anywhere near this big, $590 million in May 2013 (when, by the way, an 84-year-old woman in Florida won it all), a number of good articles were written by people better at math than me demonstrating how the expected value of a ticket was actually positive once the pot hit about $345 million or more. In other words, it makes perfect sense to play when there’s this much money on the line.
The truth is, I just don’t want to win that kind of money.
Look: I have a difficult time budgeting $100, much less nine million times that amount, and making choices in general is not an easy task for me. You don’t want to go to the liquor store with me — I’ll spend 45 minutes choosing between a sixer of a craft IPA or a box of wine, get home and immediately regret not buying a bottle of tequila because that’s what I really wanted. I know for many people, fantasizing about what they would do with their lotto winnings is half the fun — they’d put half of it into the market, travel the world for a year and then buy their parents a house and all their friends a car and set up a nonprofit to reunite all the lost boys of Sudan with their childhood pets (for some reason, a sudden addiction to super cars and cocaine isn’t high on many lists though it seems so sensible) — but for me just thinking about what to do with all that money fills me with anxiety. I can’t imagine the self-negating dread I would feel if I actually won.
Money feels best when we get it as part of a reward for a stimulus — lottery winnings are just money out of nowhere. All reward, but no stimulus.
I have no doubt that many people really would do wonderful things with all that cash. A good friend of mine listed a lot of beautiful, philanthropic causes he would get after with his new-found capital and I have every reason to believe he would and could pull them off. I’m not so convinced of my own competence. I’ll be the first to tell you that wealth is often capricious and that there is no linear correlation between effort and riches in contemporary America, but there is a correlation. I can’t get my shit together enough to make earn and budget $50,000 a year — handling millions is quite a jump.
Money is a funny thing. It’s a medium of exchange, sure, allowing you to trade for basic goods and services, which makes it something of a utility. You get a hold of enough of it and it can be a medium for conducting power, or, according to recent jurisprudence, even speech. We like to say money isn’t everything and how it doesn’t make you who you are, but it’s hard to deny that money also serves as something of a yardstick for our sense of success and self-worth. When I was a kid, I would sometimes imagine what it would be like to rich — surely every kid does at some point — But after I had imagined by Toys R’ Us spree, I was always left with an empty feeling. It sure felt great to be able to spend a bunch of money I got from nowhere, but it would feel better to be able to spend a bunch of money I made by doing something great.
I’m convinced that what people really want is a job that makes us rich, not riches that allow us to forget about wanting a job.
Think about this. What would you rather have: $900 million dollars or $900 million dollars because you invented a cure for cancer? Money feels best when we get it as part of a reward for a stimulus — lottery winnings are just money out of nowhere. All reward, but no stimulus.
Past lottery winners are often ebullient when they first win — of course they are — until they find that they can’t find themselves in the money they spend. It doesn’t matter if it’s frivolous spending or philanthropy, spending money doesn’t bring lasting satisfaction because it’s not in spending money that we find self-worth. Many winner’s say they find their money is a curse, that they wish they could go back to getting a regular paycheck. There’s a certain important feeling we get from working for a living — the fact that we often cannot make enough money from working to make a living, and that our jobs are often shitty notwithstanding. I’m convinced that what people really want is a job that makes us rich, not riches that allow us to forget about having a job.
Losing money is the whole point of gambling, which is why playing the lotto is such a weird thing to do.
Money is intimately tied into our internal reward system, the same dopamine dependent circuitry that gets hijacked when we take drugs like heroin or cocaine. Drugs can stimulate that reward circuit so hard, give you such a powerful sense of reward that the scale gets compressed and skewed. Normal rewards stop working. We lose the incentive to do things. We become emotionally insulated from the things that make up human life, from doing the dishes to the effort necessary to make new friends.
Getting a sudden payday of near limitless wealth skews your sense of reward in a similar way. You get insulated from feelings of value, having divorced effort from acquisition. You can become insulated even from the feeling that you have a lot of money — $900 million is not an amount of money that you can really conceptualize with a human brain. It’s virtually limitless, and it’s hard to feel like you own and control something that’s limitless. It’s just an abstraction. There’s a reason why gambling has always been a favorite past-time of the aristocracy — when you have so much money that money loses its meaning, you have to contrive artificial situations that allow you to feel like you have money. You have to make it possible to “go broke” in order to set limits upon your wealth and to bring it into definition. You become an insensate quadriplegic tonguing their toothache just to feel something that’s real. Losing money is the whole point of gambling, which is why playing the lotto is such a weird thing to do.
In narrative terms, sudden, vast wealth ruins the story, robs it off all conflict. It’s the ultimate plot device, enabling the hero to overcome all obstacles without effort and making the tale an utter snore. I mean, I don’t want to get killed off early in my own story, but the hero needs to have a reason to go outdoors every once in awhile or things get pretty damn boring pretty quickly.
The truth is, I just don’t want to win that kind of money.
As quick aside, I am a liberaltarian (socially fiscal, conservatively liberal) and therefore support a Universal Basic Income for all: A payment to all citizens that covers basic needs. It’s got something for everybody, supporting the poor and simultaneously reducing or eliminating the need for coercive labor unions. But if you’ve stuck with me this far, you’re probably wondering why I don’t see this as a contradiction. If money divorced from achievement is a curse, isn’t a basic income a terrible idea?
It’s all a matter of scale. A basic income of say, $12,000 a year, or even $20,000 a year can make a real difference in someone’s life, but it’s on a human scale. You can grasp ten grand. You can count it. It’s not seemingly limitless. It’s money in a range where it still counts as a means of exchange, as tokens for basic goods and services, not yet enough to begin to mediate power or speech. It’s money that fits into your life as you live it; it may improve your life, but it doesn’t insulate you from your life. It still makes sense to work or to volunteer. It augments your desires and ambitions rather than supplanting them. It’s not so much money that you are insulated from feeling a sense of reward from achievement. It sets a mark on the ruler instead of throwing the ruler out the window.
“But what about billionaires like Bill Gates or Elon Musk?” You might ask. “They haven’t gone bankrupt in some instinctive death-wish like urge to become normal again or flamed out in drug and hooker fueled flames of depressive glory. What about your stupid contrarian theories now you nerd!”
It’s different for people that became wealthy through some sort of achievement. Sure, there’s still a lot of luck involved, and the money often came in huge sums overnight, but it was still attached to some project, something they were doing with their lives. The money came as a reward for something that they did, so rather than compressing and skewing their internal reward circuitry, it expanded it. Bill Gates moved on to try and cure malaria. Musk has only set the modest goals of building a whole new auto-industry and colonizing Mars. Both Musk and Gates had networks, businesses and channels for utilizing wealth. It fit the scale of their lives. They had, in other words, a robust frame on which to strap the engine of great and sudden wealth.
I have no such frame. Handing me $900 million dollars would be like strapping a jet engine on a hang glider.
Then of course there’s Donald Trump. The guy is a jerk, to put it kindly, but the Donald might be wiser than many give him credit for. Many children of the wealthy suffer from the same sicknesses of the soul that come to afflict big lotto winners, perhaps have it even worse. Trump expanded his sense of reward and his ambition and parlayed his $40 million inheritance into a business empire designed to be the perfect ego fluffer. Sure, he could have made a lot more money if he had just invested that inheritance in some mutual funds and left it alone for 30 years, but he might also have been a miserable fellow. For better or worse, no one accuses Trump of being in poor spirits.
But for all that argument, I may well be full of shit. If I found the winning Powerball ticket lying on the ground, I can’t say for certain what I would do, but odds are I would cash that sucker: $900 million buys a lot of time to figure out a sense of purpose in your life despite having just won $900 million. Twain was right, it’s dangerous to be offered great wealth — that’s why I’m not even giving myself the opportunity to be tempted.
That, and the $2 I save will be good for some wine to drown my regret if the office pool wins …
Good luck tonight folks, and if you win, remember us little folks still paying off our student loans. We could use some human-scale assistance.
Update: Seconds after posting this, the jackpot was revised to $900 million. That really is a lot of money …
