That caught me by surprise. I forgot how to play my lottery game. For years, I’ve played this game with myself. What would I do if I won the lottery? I’d imagine a range of answers from winning $1 to winning $1B. This week, I realized I’d been so busy moving into my tiny house (MyTinyExperiment.com) that I hadn’t played the game in a while. Instead of mentally rattling off a list of possibilities, my answer was a blank. How’d that happen? What did that mean? Cool. Being debt-free had deeper effects than I expected. Unintended consequences can be quiet – and significant.

Here’s one example of how the game, or rather the exercise, went just a few months ago. 
Win $1. Thank you. Can I have another ticket?
Win $10. OK. I’d like a ticket for the next ten drawings. (In WA you can pre-buy tickets 25 drawings in advance. Handy for lazy gambling.)
Win $100. Give me the money! And the money will go into my wallet, merely delaying my next trip to the ATM.
Win $1,000. Give me the money, or better, give my bank the money – with maybe a $100 splurge. (Which is less than some folks spend in dinner without noticing it.)
Win $10,000. Nice. Not much more of a splurge. If I had any debt, pay off a chunk. Invest the rest.
Win $100,000. Pay down debt. Fix up the house. Take care of some medical bills. Splurge a bit, which might be a trip to visit family the next time the weather discourages hiking, but I want a break. Hello, Amtrak.
Win $1,000,000. Hello, doctor. Hello, realtor. Something nice near the Salish Sea. 
Win $10,000,000. Hello, philanthropy. And all the rest.
Win $100,000,000 or more. Take lessons from the people I’ve met for whom excess wealth damaged their perspective. Philanthropy, for sure. Keep it simple, but with the ability to do so Very Comfortably.

So, I saw the lottery board flashing at the local convenience store which kicked off the return to that exercise – and realized nothing came to mind. What? Where’d those ideas go?

It took me about three days of occasional and casual introspection to finally realize that my lifestyle is now so much less driven by debt (e.g. effectively none) that many more of my needs are being met. Prior to selling my house on Whidbey, I was living with a mortgage, a home equity loan, and credit card debt. Every day, deferred responsibilities nagged me to get something done; but I couldn’t because I would have to go deeper into debt. Ah, but if I won the lottery, those nags could be silenced. 

I sold my house. The debts are gone. My view is gone, too. (But the world literally looks better, which may be the topic of a subsequent post.)

Frequently, I hear criticisms of poor people who shouldn’t be playing the lottery. For me, the lottery played two major roles and a few minor ones. 1) Desperation. If working hard isn’t getting rid of personal poverty, then why not try an occasional $1 bet? The odds are very small, but not buying a ticket means the odds are zero. It could happen to you! So they say, and evidently, it does happen to random people. 2) Mental health. I’m not going to dig for Sun Tzu’s quote but basically, there’s a tremendous difference between being trapped versus knowing there’s at least one way out of a bad situation. Knowing I had a ticket in my wallet meant that there was a possibility of a way out. It might be highly improbable, but improbable is not impossible. A $1 ticket was an economical way to alleviate at least some anxieties – and was a lot cheaper than the preferred but expensive professional counseling. There’s a third approach presented by some economist. There’s an entertainment value to the ticket. Compare the cost and benefit of a $1 and the dreams it enables to the cost and benefit of a movie ticket. A movie lasts 2 hours and costs $10-$15. The movie’s cost is $5-$7.50/hour. $1 worth of a movie is roughly 1/5 of an hour. If buying a lottery ticket lets someone dream for more than that amount of time, it was a better deal than the movie, and cheaper.

And my brain’s recent response wasn’t working from desperation, a mental health break, or the need for escapism.

Imagine a pause in there because I paused at that realization.

Being in debt with more money going out than coming in was more than a financial shift. For years, I’d been in a haze of desperation, mental health issues, and wanting an escape. That consumed more than a small amount of my mind.

That much more of me is now free. (Had to go for the rhyme as I typed that.)

I pause as I type as I think about the millions of people who feel the need for an escape. They can feel trapped and desperate, especially because conventional wisdom no longer is reliable. As usual, the folks who may need counseling are the ones least likely to afford it. Maybe this is a source of the tons of anguish we’re seeing played out in our world.

Sigh.

And I continue to buy lottery tickets, one per drawing, generally. I feel like I’ve gone from floundering and trying to tread water to having found a large piece of driftwood or a small raft. I’m still floating down where the sharks live. Forget bootstraps. I’m not aiming for a yacht, either. (Though I am intrigued by the next generation of electric boats.) But sustainably safe is still out of reach, but getting closer. I continue to write, invest, and generally do what I can to improve my life. Wish me good luck, and I wish it for you, too.