I won’t lie: For a moment on Tuesday night, I believed.
The notification popped up on my phone at around 10pm: An Irish ticket purchaser had won the big one. As it happens, earlier that day I’d gone to town to run what I thought was a boring errand – fixing a slow puncture on my car’s front left tyre – only to learn that in fact, the tyre rim itself was cracked. Awaiting the bad news, I wandered across the street, and bought myself two lines on the euromillions (€7), two lines on the national lottery for Wednesday (€6) and a 99 ice cream cone to soothe my soon-to-be-bruised wallet (a disgraceful €3). I shoved the tickets in the wallet, and forgot about them, until that notification came through.
When I retrieved the ticket and glanced down at it, there was even the briefest moment of true elation. The first winning number in Tuesday’s draw was “16”. That was also the first number of my second purchased line. There was a millisecond – a millisecond – where it just could have been me. Alas, that was the only number on either line that matched.
It will be popular in the coming days amongst those of us who did not win the Euromillions to express a degree of sympathy for the person who did. That’s the strangest thing about lotto psychology: You’ll have people saying things like “that amount of money would be more trouble than it’s worth”, and so on. You’ll have others saying things like “I’d be happier without it”. Which poses a simple and obvious question: Why did we all buy the tickets, then?
I’ll say this of myself, and perhaps others will relate to it: I genuinely do not want €250m. From a financial perspective, all I have ever wanted is to live a comfortable life – by which I mean the kind of life where money is not a source of stress. The kind of life where you do not lie awake at night worrying about how you are going to pay for things like the car service or the insurance or the kids childcare bills. Drinking champagne on the back of a yacht moored at Monaco? That wouldn’t be for me. Comfort and low stress – that will do nicely.
But that’s the point about the €250m: The winner, whomever they are, can now choose whatever life they desire for themselves. They can pack in work, or they can ignore the cash and keep going, free of any worries about losing their job or paying the mortgage. They can work for the joy of working, in other words. They can fly around the world first-class, in one of those Emirates planes with the hotel-room sleeping quarters. They can donate untold sums to animal welfare. In fact they could just give the whole lot away, if they want to (though again: why buy the ticket?). They can live a life of untold decadence and indulgence if that appeals to them.
That’s why we all bought the tickets: The desire to be able to do almost whatever we want.
Legendary Irish broadcaster Vincent Browne used to rail against the lotto, and particularly the Euromillions, on two distinct grounds. First, that the wealth handed out to individuals was obscene. Second, that the lotto itself represented a form of “tax on hope”, whereby poorer people are parted from their money in order to indulge in a dream that will, for 99.99% of people, never come to pass. He thought – and I presume still thinks – that the whole thing is utterly immoral.
He’s right in both of his criticisms, by the way: €250m is much more than any one person would ever truly need to live a comfortable, stress-free life. Giving 100 people €2.5m each would be far more efficient, if the purpose of the lottery was just to make as many people as possible free from the stress of money worries. And he is also right that the sale of the tickets themselves represent a tax on people’s dreams.
Here’s where I think he is wrong, though: Dreams are important. Most of us will never be Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or even the kind of moderately successful businessman or woman who makes a few million in ready cash. For the majority of people, the national lottery and the euromillions are literally the only way we can ever conceive of having truly transformational wealth.
The fact that it is a remote possibility, and the fact that the chances of it coming to pass are almost zero, is largely irrelevant. That’s the nature of dreams: Millions more children dream of being astronauts than ever make it. For every eight year old dreaming of becoming the next Lionel Messi, only one in a few million will even make it as a professional footballer. It would be a particularly mean person who would go around schools telling children not to dream, and it would be a particularly mean adult who would do the same thing to people for whom the lottery is a casual way of imagining the very remote possibility of a different life.
So to the €250m winner, I say: Congratulations. And that’s it. There will be those who will insist you have responsibilities now, or that you need to use your money to do this good thing or some other thing. But the whole point is: You don’t. You have just won the right to do pretty much whatever you want to do with your life and your fortune, and that includes spending the rest of your days in a penthouse in Las Vegas blowing it all on the slot machines, if that’s what you want.
As for me, I’ll keep paying my tax on hope, and on bad days, imagining that alternative life where Mrs. McGuirk and I retreat to a fully serviced cabin in Tahiti to spend a life drinking little drinks with umbrellas in them. Assuming, of course, that she doesn’t just take her share of the money and run. Few would blame her.