What would you do if you won the lottery?

In any random list of writing prompts, this is a question that often pops up. After all, everyone thinks about it when you hear what the Lotto 649 Jackpot is this week: What would it be like to win a million or ten million or fifty million dollars? What would it be like to really be rolling in the dough?

There are, of course, the stock answers, the ones that kind of make sense: I’d pay off my mortgage and maybe all my family’s mortgages. I’d quit my job. I’d travel the world. I’d never have to shovel snow/mow the lawn/clean the bathroom again – unless I really wanted to. I would buy a new [fill in the blank]. And then I would ridiculously wonder to myself if a million or ten million or fifty million dollars would really be enough, you know, to do it ALL.

The brilliance of the question is that if you’re really honest with yourself, you can figure out a lot about what you really want – right now – without the lottery. If telling your boss “I QUIT” is your first impulse, then maybe that job isn’t serving you so well anymore and you need to find a new job or a new attitude. If travelling is first on the docket, then maybe you need to figure out how to get to Mexico or Moose Jaw more often. Me, I would buy up all the tired little houses and fix ’em up and sell them without worrying about making a profit. Maybe even give them away. Not practical, probably, but it would be kind of fun, right?

There’s also the darker question, the one we might not think of right away: what kind of lottery are we talking about? A Shirley Jackson lottery? You remember her eerie story that you read in high school, the one that pinged in your brain when you watched the movie The Hunger Games – where A PERSON is selected by lottery? And not for anything good. No thanks, I don’t want to win that one.

In Neil Pasricha’s book The Happiness Equation, he admonishes his audience to REMEMBER THE LOTTERY whenever we start thinking ridiculous things like “my life sucks” or “there’s never enough”. Our human brains have a propensity to look for problems, so such pessimistic thinking is actually natural. It’s a bit of a survival mechanism. It’s what spurs us to keep buying lottery tickets in the first place. But we can also remind our brains: Hey, remember? You’re alive, you’re here. And that means you’ve already won. You’ve survived this far.

Remember the lottery. Being alive means you’ve already won.