lotto addiction

Just watching TV tonight, I saw an ad for the latest Powerball draw being a whopping $50million. As I watched the ad I was reminded again about how addicted our society is to a way of life that is slowly killing us. It’s what Brian McLaren calls the ‘suicide machine.’

Study after study has shown that money does not make us happy, and, in Australian society, once you own more than about $100,000 any amount over that won’t increase your happiness. Yet despite this we still enter lotto draws that offer such incredible amounts of money, believing that ‘life could be a dream.’ And it is becoming more popular. If this is not addiction then I don’t know what is.

For the addict, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. The thing we are doing over and over is trying to get rich, and the different result we are expecting – which goes against all the evidence – is that it will be different for us. If we were an addict in a 12 Step program, we wouldn’t be at Step 1 which is the acknowledgment that we have a problem. We are a culture in denial.

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