[tiffanyh]

What people often overlook about lottos is that for a few dollars, you’re buying the chance to dream about a better life.

And that dream lasts right up until you check the numbers.

That’s the part rational investors tend to miss … the power of dreaming.

And I’ll admit it - I play the lottery too, even though I already live a pretty comfortable life.

[parasti]

You're romanticizing, sadly. Every time I see someone scratching off numbers, I see a twisted industry exploiting human hopefulness and naivety. Dreaming costs nothing.

[wpm]

Scratch offs are a different beast than big games like the PowerBall

[fragmede]

Gambling addiction is such a crippling disease. There should be accredited gambling laws so people can't gamble what they don't have.

[Towaway69]

When I see office workers walking off to the dreamer highrise offices in the sky, I enviously dream of being that worker in the sky, with all those dreams of grandeur.

Dreaming does cost nothing.

[ssl232]

I play the national lottery in the UK mainly because of the good causes it supports. Athletes competing in the Olympics for Team GB for example receive significant funding from the lottery. I see my ticket as a charity donation with the added fun of an astronomically small chance of winning money.

[stevekemp]

There's a property website which covers my local area, and every few weeks I'll do a search for the city-center, and sort by highest-price.

It's fun to look at the kinda house you could buy if you had €5 million in the bank. Even though I'd never have that much, and even if I did I wouldn't spend it on such a thing.

That's a habit I picked up when I lived in the UK and I played their national lottery once every month or so.

(/r/SpottedonRightmove/ is also a fun sub if you like this kinda thing; "right move" is a UK estate agents chain.)

[_mitterpach]

Couldn’t the dreaming be done even without betting? This feels like an excuse to me to be completely honest.

I’ve personally had thoughts about what I would do if I were millionaire, and given the amount of stories of people coming into a large sums of money and their life getting significantly worse, I’d prefer to actually not win it.

[happymellon]

> Couldn’t the dreaming be done even without betting?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome, rather than knowing you have to wake up tomorrow to spend the day driving around and pissing in bottles. An outside force that could change circumstances is a better feeling than knowing that really isn't any way of changing your career when you can't go to school because you can't afford it.

[latexr]

That law, as per its name, applies to headlines in publications, not literally every question. Otherwise the answer to everything would be “no”.

> Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome

Anecdotally, I know almost no one who plays the lottery, but almost everyone at some point has shared an “if I won the lottery” dream. Playing isn’t a prerequisite. It’s not too different from dreaming of becoming a rockstar when you can’t even play an instrument. Most of us have some version of that, no money necessary.