Lottobots, Transform and Roll Out
Something about the lottery (the one where you win money, not the one where they kill you with rocks) is deeply depressing to me. It’s not just the futility - the whole “tax on people who don’t understand statistics” thing - though that’s a part of it. It has more to do with people’s attitudes.
I keep meeting people, people like me, in the same comfortable straits that I am, that consider the lottery a panacea. If only they could win the lottery, they say, they’d finally be able to enjoy their life. I’m not talking about sweatshop workers sewing four-hundred designer sweaters a day, or miners hacking at the walls in a cramped, dark, dangerous tunnel, but software developers. People who are, by any measure, pretty successful. Working jobs that frequently offer flexible hours and pay large amounts of money for interesting, creative work.
Shouldn’t that be enough to keep anyone happy?
The worst is when entire offices all pitch in a couple bucks to play the lottery every week. What does that say about the business as a whole, exactly, when all your employees are carrying around this silly little fantasy that they might someday be able to tell you to fuck off before they drive across town and trade their Honda in for a Mercedes SL600 AMG?
My first job out of school, things were going downhill for a while before I left. We had a little team of maybe half a dozen people, and we were good at our jobs, we knew it, but were constantly undercut and undervalued by management. So we started pitching in two bucks every week, so that when we’d all take off mid-afternoon to get coffee we could brag about what we’d do with our share of the millions.
But that was an act of desperation, wasn’t it? Not business as usual…
But it seems to happen in lots of offices. Your job sucks, I guess, and here’s the only way out you can imagine. Why don’t you find a better job? Why don’t you find something you’d do even if you won the lottery, something you’re passionate about, and try to make a living doing that?
Am I being intolerant?
Just because I believe in making my living doing something I truly want to do - and not just something at which I’m capable of performing - does that mean the same thing is the right, the proper and correct way, for everyone? Maybe that’s just a little bit self-righteous.
But the idea that work is something you just tolerate - for a third of your waking life - so that you can grope at your real passions with whatever energy you have left, that’s never sat well with me. So, alright, I also want something better to come along. You can either buy a ticket every week and hope for the entropy of the universe to deliver what you’re waiting for, or your can try to build it yourself. The latter is my lottery ticket.