Every year, estranged family members buy their nieces, nephews, and distant cousins a $5 scratcher for their birthday. With no other viable gifts at hand, sometimes the chance at a win is enough to keep the familial ties alive. In fact, if you were to win, I can almost guarantee that the same person who gave you the scratcher would come to collect ‘their portion’ of the winnings as a finder’s fee. Oh how the turntables. 

Games of chance like the lottery have a way of pointing out exactly how broke you really are. Although playing the game and spending $100 a month on Mega Millions tickets seems like a worthy investment for the cash prize, the real reason we play isn’t because we think we’ll actually win. We play the lottery so that us regular folks can daydream (just for a second) that we’ll never have to work again a day in our life. And that hope alone is worth losing the lottery a hundred times over. Get to scratchin’, fellow dice-rollers!