What Would You Do if You Won the Lottery?

Honestly, a lot of answers these days are kind of depressing.

The Mega Millions, a multi-state lottery in America, just had its jackpot hit 1.33 billion dollars, and a single ticket sold in Chicago won. That person is going to wind up with several hundred million dollars after taxes, and that’s some life-changing money right there.

The question that gets thrown around a lot is “what would you do if you won the lottery?” As kids, we used to fantasize about that kind of thing — travel the world, buy all the things we ever wanted, stuff like that. We used to talk about how you could stick a million dollars in a savings account and live off the interest.

Oh, to be young again.

These days, a lot of people — far more than really should be the case — answer that question more pragmatically. The first thing that comes to most minds is “pay off all my debt.” Student loan debt, medical debt, auto loans, and credit card debt all come to mind since the cost of all of those things is absurd.

The next answer is often “buy a house” or “pay off my mortgage,” which is a dream that is out of reach for many thanks to the absurd housing market and credit scores that dominate everything we do. When you have all of the debt that I named in the last paragraph, there’s a decent chance your credit isn’t great.

After that comes things like “live comfortably,” which again is something that a lot of people can’t say that they do. Being able to buy healthy food and afford your medications and bills every month is a dream for quite a few people, something that will never be within their reach.

Only then, after we get past all the things that are necessary for comfort and happiness — a place to live that is safe, no debt, and a healthy life — do we start getting to the extravagant stuff. Travel, fancy houses and cars, and nice things tend to come later down the line of the answers I hear. Even still, lots of people don’t even get there until after they say things like “pay off all of my friends’ debts, and also maybe dump $10,000 into random GoFundMe requests so some stranger can have a good day.”

We have come to live in a world where the big dreams in life aren’t things like “buying a yacht” or “traveling the world for six months straight” or “owning three homes.” Instead, the things that we dream about when we think of having a bunch of money are things like “not living paycheck to paycheck” and “not having crippling amounts of debt.”

For many of us, the travel and fancy stuff take a backseat to simply living a comfortable life. We all work hard and do our best and bust our butts to bring in enough money to scrape by, and at the end of the week, we’re all so exhausted that we barely get a chance to enjoy our weekend before it’s back to the grind. That, of course, is assuming we have a weekend to enjoy and not a second or third job that we have to work just to survive.

That’s kinda depressing. American society is such that time off is not a guarantee, healthcare and education are expensive, and the American Dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is, basically, dead for millions of us. Heck, I work a solid job that supports my partner, myself, and our four cats, and I still feel like no matter what I do, we will never be truly comfortable in life because at any moment, one of us could get sick and it all crumbles down.

I don’t know what I would do if I won a billion dollars. Probably all of the things I described above — pay off all my debts, pay off all my friends’ debts, and then drop $25 million into a stable investment portfolio, and live comfortably off of that for the rest of my life. Aside from that, I’d probably put money into many charitable ventures ranging from city-altering stuff to filling random GoFundMes.

I might travel a bit and see parts of the world that I’ve never seen and always wanted to, but I mostly just want to live comfortably. The good life I was promised as a kid never fully materialized for me, and I really just want that more than anything.

And, in a way, it’s incredibly frustrating that we are living in a generation of people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who did everything right and still wound up getting hosed. So many people in my orbit did things by the book — went to college, got good grades, and graduated with a degree — and still wound up working shitty retail jobs into their late 20s and beyond.

So now, tens of millions of people don’t have a lot of big dreams of winning the lottery beyond “not being in debt.” There are so many of us who live lives so devoid of hope for the future that the idea of simply being comfortable seems unattainable. That’s terrible.

I have many, many ideas for how to fix this, but I’ve talked about them a lot elsewhere, so I’ll spare you for now. Suffice to say, the system is broken, and I’m afraid it’s broken beyond repair for most of us.

Unless you’re already rich, then the system is working as intended.

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Here are a few more articles about how broken things are: