Matt Heath: It’s best to be happy without winning Lotto

Picture yourself walking to a river kilometres away and carrying the day’s water back home on your head. There are plenty of people in the world who do this very thing every day. Photo / AP

OPINION

A couple in Invercargill won $17 million last week. Like many other New Zealanders, I found this annoying as I assumed I was going to win. We all had plans for that cash, and we got nothing. Many of us have lost Lotto hundreds of times in a row. You would think we would get used to it. But this latest loss got me thinking; maybe it’s time I tied my happiness to something that is more likely to happen. Instead of fantasising about having millions, maybe we could learn to be happy with what we have.

For those struggling to get by day to day in this cost-of-living crisis, winning Lotto would solve that problem. But it is worth noting that a financial strategy based on something that almost certainly won’t happen, like winning Lotto, isn’t a good one, and our time spent fantasising about it could be spent more productively.

If you are reading this, you are likely better off than 99 per cent of humans that have ever lived. We won big just by being born in an era with indoor plumbing. Yet if you are like me, instead of feeling thankful for the food on our tables and the roofs over our heads, you spend large parts of your life wishing for more. We walk around in a daze imagining new watches, phones, houses and boats. Surely there are more productive ways to use our minds, especially when there’s no guarantee these things would bring us happiness.

In their 1971 work “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society”, Canadian and American psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell introduced the concept of “Hedonic Adaptation” - a theory positing that people repeatedly return to their baseline level of happiness, regardless of what happens to them. You dream of a new car; you buy it, you enjoy it for a while, then return to your previous emotional state and start wanting something else.

Lotto winners get caught off-guard by this phenomenon. They assume suddenly having millions of dollars will solve all their problems. They frequently find themselves back at their previous levels of happiness or even worse off. Wealth doesn’t end all your troubles; it just changes them. Our desires and our discontent follow us no matter where we are or what we possess because we are born to want more than we have. William B Irvine, professor of philosophy at Wright State University, explained this concept to me over a Zoom call last year.

“You’re wired never to be satisfied because your ancestors who were satisfied didn’t make it. The guy who said, ‘I’m going to sit out here on the Savannah and appreciate what I have’ - a lion ate that guy.”

Whatever we have, we tend to want something else. That’s why rampant purchasing isn’t the path to happiness. You can buy everything there is and still want more.

Seneca (4 BC-65AD) was one of the richest men in Rome. He worked hard and had no problem with accumulating wealth and owning beautiful expensive things, but he warned against tying happiness to them. He believed you should learn to be happy with or without. As he wrote: “No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.”

Negative visualisation can be a useful starting point on the journey towards apprehension. Next time you are at your kitchen sink getting a drink of water, stop for a second and imagine not having hot and cold running H2O. Picture yourself walking to a river kilometres away and carrying the day’s water back home on your head. There are plenty of people in the world who do this very thing every day. To them, having your kitchen would be like winning the lottery. When framed in this way, that mundane glass of water is suddenly something you are very pleased to have. If the thought pops into your head that a new vehicle will make you happy, before you spend the money, visualise the car you have already crashed or stolen. You can make yourself love what you have by imagining it gone.

I hope $17m makes the Invercargill Lotto winners’ lives better. They may use it “to supply greater scope to practise virtue” as Seneca suggested. Good luck to them. The problem is the rest of us. Like many of you, I spent that week before fantasising about that money. It was a waste of time. We will almost certainly never win $17m, but there is a chance we could learn to be grateful for what we have. There is nothing wrong with buying a Lotto ticket for fun, but maybe we should spend less time thinking about winning money and more enjoying our lives as is where is.

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