It isn‘t about winning

Get happy: Why playing the lottery can be helpful / #31

I took this photo today at my holiday location in the bavarian village Bayerisch Eisenstein.

Playing the lottery is a big thing in Germany (almost 22 million out of 80 million play at least occasionally). You can see displays like the one in the picture above at every corner shop in Germany.

Do people play the lottery to win? If they did, they wouldn't be happy. The chances of winning are minimal (in a lottery in which you pick six numbers from a possible pool of 49 numbers, your chances of winning the jackpot are 1 in 13,983,816).

Almost nobody wins relevant sums.

So, is playing the lottery irrational and stupid? It is not. Because spending money on the lottery is not for winning. People give money for the prospect of winning. They pay for hope.

That doesn't seem unwise to me. Hope is a necessity of life. You hope, before you fall asleep, to wake up the following day. You hope to stay or become healthy. And you hope to do something crazy in the future (with the money you get as a winner). For a few euros a week, people can buy at least some kind of hope.

However, there is still a bit of irrationality in this behaviour. After all, what good is a hope that hardly has a chance of becoming reality? But that seems to be a very human irrationality. We like to cling to even the smallest of hopes.

Onwards,

Johannes Eber