(I originally wrote this in January before the site came to fruition but decided to stick it up anyways. File it under ‘angry rants’)
I am continually amazed at humanity’s ignorance. An exciting time is upon us yet again as the Powerball is the top story on Planet Earth.
“What would you do with the winning Powerball ticket? I’d buy a private jet,” barked one person ten thousand people on Facebook. Of course you would get a private jet; everyone fucking would you egotistical crackpot.
The real problem here is MY attitude towards everyone getting all horny about the Powerball ticket. I have made great strides in my rage toward the trivialities’ in humanity, but I admittedly still get myself worked up sometimes. Allow me to elaborate on my indignation…
Whenever this lottery shit starts getting in the hundreds of millions, the entire country seems to explode with excitement. It’s on the news, The Weather Channel; everyone is talking about it at every store, office, and corner of the internet.
Everyone buys a ticket or 100, and talks until they are blue in the face or they break their fingers on the keyboard about what their plans are for when they win the jackpot. There is one slightly misjudged characteristic about this course of events.
YOU DON’T WIN THE JACKPOT YOU DAYDREAMERS.
The odds of winning the Powerball are 1 in 292 million. That means that it is extraordinarily unfucking likely to happen.
I attempted to calculate this out with numerous internet calculators, but the asinine numbers caused the calculators to return a bunch of Wingding gibberish horseshit characters, and ultimately the percentage that was shown to me was 0.000000%
Simply put = NOT A FUCKING CHANCE.
Now, this alone doesn’t really upset me all that much. I just laugh it off and wish everyone a great day and hope they toss their 54 losing tickets into a recycle bin so the Texas sized trash piles in the oceans don’t grow any larger.
The real problematic (or opportunistic, depending on what side of the aisle you are on) to this aspect of humanity is when you turn these extremely, unimaginably narrow odds and apply it to something negative. You know, like a terrorist attack!
The odds of YOU, yes YOU reading this, of being killed in a terrorist attack are 1 in 25 million. Comparatively, the odds of choking to death on your lunch are 1 in 4,000. You should be shaking with terror and shitting in your pants every time you head to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Look out, Aunt Millie’s Spilt Top Wheat is going to kick your ass!
This is not what happens obviously. After the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, the entire internet erupted with fear, or should I say, TERROR. Just glance for a moment on any corner of the internet, and everyone is in DOOMSDAY mode.
Let’s just stay inside and endlessly scroll through the Facebook newsfeed with our smartphones and wait for our inevitable deaths inside the safety of our same old homes.
The odds of you being killed by prescription painkillers is 1 in 290. The odds of you being killed in a car accident are 1 in 77. ONE IN SEVENTY SEVEN.
Meanwhile, most people reading this, or anything on the internet, are doing so with their smartphones pressed up against their fucking steering wheel. A few of them just ran a red light, and one them just about plowed into my rear bumper while I was writing this.
No, I won’t act like I’m innocent. We all engage in blatantly risky, yet mundane behaviors every day, such as using our phones while walking or driving, or getting into a car period. Yet we live in fear of these nearly impossible circumstances and events that will never come to fruition.
We live in this pointless fear which serves no purpose other than to weaken us and drag us away from our dreams and fulfillment. So many of us forego our dreams of travelling for the fear of a terrorist attack, the fear of a plane crash, or the most pathetic, the fear of what THEY WILL THINK OF ME, yet we happily buy a bunch of Powerball tickets, knowing fully well that we won’t win that $900 million jackpot bullshit.
The reality is, you are more likely to be killed by a pissed off vending machine tumbling itself down the hallway while simultaneously having your legs gnawed off by a land shark, than you are to win the Powerball, yet you fling your rare and precious dollars at the person behind the counter just to distract yourself from your lack of fulfillment in life.
That money and mental energy would be better spent on virtually anything else. Those saved twenties, fives, and even ones add up into enough to take a weekend trip to a new city, your favorite beach camp site, or enough for that new power tool you need for your garage project.
Instead, you squander away your money and time for the non-existent chance of winning a seemingly unlimited amount of money. Never mind that most lottery winners always seem to end up bankrupt, broke, miserable, or dead anyways. The universe will not allow anyone to keep undeserved riches, (but that’s a story I’ll tell in the future).
We get all disappointed and pissy when we don’t win the lottery, but run around in horror whenever a terror attack affects a few dozen people in a faraway land that many of us couldn’t even identify on a map. Even in terror-prone, eternal war Israel, the weekly number of casualties from terror and warfare almost never comes close to the number of traffic deaths in said country, according to Professor Kahneman at Princeton University.
You are more likely to be chewed up and swallowed by a cuddly polar bear in Florida while walking home from buying your lottery ticket than to win said lottery. The odds of being killed by terrorist aren’t much higher, yet thousands of people will tragically forego experiencing the world this year, instead choosing to live a life of depravity, rotting in front of the television. SPOILER ALERT: You are more likely to die at home lounging in front of the television than you are from all other causes of death combined, whether or not you want to factor in the 1 in 7 odds of dying from heart disease.
So save those damn dollars for something worthwhile, and start fulfilling your destiny. You will never ever win the lottery so kill your bullshit fantasy world and start living your life in reality. You aren’t going to die in a plane crash or terrorist attack so get off your ass and get on a plane to see all the awe and wonder that the world has on display for you to appreciate.
Even if you are killed in a plane crash, despite the one in a million odds against it, that’s a much more worthwhile way of vanishing from Earth than sitting on your couch eating Taco Bell while watching Burger King commercials and sharting in your pants.
If you already feel as I do about all of this, do not waste your time getting angry at the silly actions of other humans. All of this insanity is perpetrated in pure ignorance, as I have learned during the days of my Vipassana meditation courses. You are only harming yourself by getting angry. Instead, I highly recommend getting a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It’s only $1 on Amazon, so no excuses.
Have you ever purchased lottery tickets in the past? Were you aware of what your purpose and desire was for doing so at the time?
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