The Cancer of MORE 🤑
Gambling is for low IQ retards.
What’s up man.
In today’s episode of The Dream Lounge we’re going to talk about the cancer of “more” in general and why gambling is for retards more specifically.
The first head on my chopping block is my brother in law Matt. Matt is a cut and dry, standard issue, older millennial beta male. We don’t get along too swell (he doesn’t like it when I call him a beta male). Some of you may have even met Matt in person at the 2019 Patriarch Convention in Orlando when he was first dating one of my sisters.
Per Florida sunshine laws Matt won a $1,000,000 scratch off ticket in Orlando, late 2021. Nice bro.
Now that’s only $780k as a lump sum, minus federal income taxes. (Florida has no income tax itself thankfully). After all that shit is paid you net a little over $500k. So you win $1,000,000 from “the government” broadly speaking and then another branch of the same government immediately takes half of their own money back, lol.
Like ~95% of other lottery winners Matt chose the lump sum. This is a terrible idea of course, which is why every sheep does it.
Why is it a bad idea? Let’s have a look.
A lot of people think that the worst thing that can happen from playing the lottery is you lose and waste money. Maybe a lot of money over time if you become a gambling addict. The years and tickets roll by. Maybe next week I’ll win with my lucky numbers.
In reality the worst thing that can happen from playing the lottery is that you win.
This was a strange idea to me when I first heard it in 2012 from emergency room physician Dr. Doug McGuff at The 21 Convention. I was like wait, what? Isn’t winning the whole point of playing?
The truth is that most people who win a lottery have serious problems after the fact. The wealth is unearned and presents a serious destructive energy potential in their life. The “70% of lottery winners go bankrupt stat” is made up, but the real number is north of 30%.
That’s only part of the picture though. Alongside bankruptcy you have divorce, drug addictions, suicide, depression, etc. “Winning” leads to a huge pot of shit at the end of that rainbow, most of the time.
Part of the reason for this is a selection bias in action. Meaning that lottery gambling naturally attracts people who are financially illiterate, desperate, and don’t understand cognitive biases or even basic math a lot of the time.
[Side note: this is why they call state lotteries a “tax on the poor”].
This is the same kind of selection bias in action when professional basketball attracts tall people, and elite level body building attracts men with missing/broken myostatin genes.
Just like this super jacked cat.
Even after taxes then, winning a cool million should be a life changing amount of money. But for most people, it won’t be. It’s just going to lead to severe life problems in most cases. Huge amounts of debt, broken relationships, even worse addictions.
A big part of why this happens is something called regression to the mean. In context this means that lottery winners will revert to their average behavior pattern that’s been building (and solidifying) for decades.
Take a random 45 year old lottery winner. Could be for $1M or $100M. That dude (or chick) has been an adult for about ~25 years. Earning, spending, and consuming for 25 years. Suddenly having that much new financial energy at their disposal is like handing a huge box of dynamite and matches to a kid.
What do you think is going to happen? They have no skill set or experience handling that much money. Nor any of the experience that would lead to accumulating that much wealth over time.
So it gets taken from them, or they destroy it, themselves, and others around them.
Winning becomes a curse.
Now you might think “I would never do that, I would be smart bla bla bla”.
But that’s what everyone thinks, especially gambling addicts. In truth you are probably not special. Breaking 25 year and longer behavior patterns all of sudden is incredibly difficult. You are stuck in your ways far more than you realize, and the required strength to break those chains is higher than you think.
It’s not impossible then to “win big” (or inherit big) and come out okay. Some people do fine. How many? I don’t know. I would guess around 20% in a classic 80/20 rule. Everyone else will fuck themselves to varying degrees of intensity as they return to the mean and worse.
End up in debt, bankrupt, on drugs, or hanging from a ceiling fan like Kermit here.
Now as for my brother in law beta Matt, I can’t confirm with 100% certainty what happened. But from what I heard through family members, all of that got blown - and then some - in under two years flat.
With nothing to show for it but a nice couch and a used Kia.
You see my sister had a Kia for a long time. Then she suddenly got a nice Benz for Christmas. Then a year later, poof, it magically turned into another used Kia again. And you thought Jesus turning water into wine was impressive. Trying turning a Kia into a Benz and back into a Kia again bro.
So I said huh, interesting, she loved that Benz. Strange but not my business, who cares.
Then I found out about this lottery win, and it all started to make sense. This win was not disclosed to me for a very specific reason that didn’t directly involve me. Nasty stuff bros.
I can’t say either if Matt is a legit “gambling addict” - what does that really mean, specifically? But in my opinion most people who play scratch off tickets all the time and similar shit like yanking on slot machines, are in fact addicted to it to some degree.
Like this creature here who pissed her pants at a Casino she was so hooked.
There’s lots of stuff like this you can find on Reddit and YouTube. Not always piss related but hilarious none the less. Add “boomer” to the search for jaw dropping lulz as their piss away their grandchildren’s future with $1,000 slot machine rolls.
The Cancer of MORE
I’ve known a handful of gambling addicts throughout my life. Family and friends both. It’s wild stuff to observe.
I’ve heard boomers complain about losing “hundreds of thousands” in the stock market, particularly around the 2008 era. This was just more gambling they did with stocks, pretending it was an investment. Ah no, you walked into a casino and got played by people who knew the game a lot better than you did.
You played with fire and got burned. What else is new?
My dad interestingly was not one of these people. He gambled in other ways, but not lottery tickets, casinos, or stock trading.
He and his buddies in SW Florida made millions in new construction and real estate through the 90s and 2000s. I grew up around engineers, architects, contractors, and real estate shit lords. Most of these overconfident dip shits (the real estate bros in particular) lost everything in the late 2000s and never recovered.
My hometown of Cape Coral was the world capital of the late 2000s housing collapse, rivaled only by Las Vegas as I understand it. Anyone with a basic understanding of economics and government meddling (like Ron Paul) saw this coming a mile away.
I heard about NINJA loans a decade before everyone else did and the boomer’s favorite line of “real estate never goes down”.
LOL
Having made over $10,000,000 in lifetime, take home income, without adjusting for inflation, my dad died in 2023 literally homeless and penniless. That was after owning a million dollar home, free and clear, from 2002 - 2009.
No mortgage, no debt from the day we walked in the house. Until taking a $500k home equity line out on it, never making a single payment back. Blowing every penny in 18 months flat.
Even bought a local Baptist pastor a $30,000 car. To get into heaven I guess?
As
pointed out to me, my dad made enough money, properly managed, to turn it into major intergenerational wealth. Instead he died with nothing, even stole $50k from my aunt.She was mad as hell when I told her that truth in 2017. But in 2020 when she called to tell me she was going to die, the first thing she did was apologize for yelling at me, and thank me for having the courage to tell her the truth.
The only one in my family to tell her that my dad was ripping her off and abusing their relationship.
What my dad, his real estate and construction buddies, and gambling addicts all have in common is something I call the cancer of more.
It’s a soul cancer that eats away at the very core of you are. This is something many Americans suffer from. They don’t live by a code of principles. They don’t fight for their values.
They just chase more. And more. And MORE. Until it eats them alive.
Catholics would call this the deadly sin of greed.
It’s sick to watch, like someone eating themselves to literal death. More cars, more boats, more houses, more Rolexes, more lotto tickets, more bullshit. Until it’s all over, and you’ve wasted your one precious life on this earth chasing useless bullshit around in circles.
Trying to fill the hole in your soul with trivial nonsense that will all turn to dust anyway.
It’s never enough for these broken people. MORE AND MORE AND MORE, it never ends.
And if you ever confront an addict about this stuff - be it alcohol, gambling, or other drugs - they predictably flip and spaz the fuck out, like walking up to a bear and poking it in the eye.
The over-defensive response is an indication that you’ve poked an emotional wound they’ve been nursing with the addiction, for years or decades. They are slaves to the addiction and usually, will never escape it.
Alcoholics who live in a perpetual relationship to the drug “I’ve been X days sober” are a great example of this. They cognitively tether themselves to the substance for life, because they choose to have no control over their body and emotions.
A tell tale sign with gambling addicts is that they frequently disclose their “wins” and never, ever their losses that mount a mile high.
I’ve heard gambling addicts verbally spell out gambler’s fallacy without even realizing it, thinking they were “gaming the system”. The shit is comical.
A tax on the poor indeed.
In summary, don’t be a gambling retard. Take risks where it counts in life, not throwing dice at the universe. Does it matter if you play the lottery once a year for a birthday or something?
Probably not, because it has no measurable impact on your life. Just pray you don’t win.
/s/ Anthony Dream Johnson