I posted this on Facebook last night. This morning I realized I should put a copy of it here, too.
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The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Do you remember that story? I think I read it in high school. It was really good and really instructive.
The Powerball is pretty big right now. $1.5 billion. Let me write that out.
$1,500,000,000
That’s a LOT of money. If you chose to get that spread out over thirty years, that would be…
$1.5B/(30 years * 12 months/year) = $4.17 million dollars per month
As far as I know, I don’t know anyone who makes ($4.17M/month * 12 months/year = $50M/yr) $50 million dollars a year.
That’s what you would get every month for thirty years. And that’s what you’re supposed to pick, so that Uncle Sam can collect interest on it for the whole time while the dollar devalues. If you’re going to make them fork it all over at once, then it will really cost you. Best to stick with the monthly plan. $4M is pretty sweet.
If you had won $4M in the lottery, that would be dream house money. That would be starting your dream business money. That would be everything that you ever wanted and a little left over.
It’s more than dream house money. You could buy ten good houses or one amazing house a month.
It’s more than dream business money. You have a business to make money and do the thing you love. Now that you have money, you can just do that thing you love. Been dreaming about a restaurant? Now you can just cook for your friends without obligations.
Continuing to fight to increase your wealth at that point, while understandable, is a bit like the guy at the gym who is built like Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane and refuses to take a day off. You go to the gym to get fit. You’re fit. You’re done for a while. Next up, go do some good with your fitness. Apart from maintenance, $1.5B takes you out of the rat race. You’re done for a while. Go do some good with it.
And I think that’s why I’m writing this. Because $1.5B is not dream house money. $1.5B is not dream business money. $1.5B is culture-changing money. It is the power to fix things… or fuck them up horribly.
$1.5B is a terrifying amount of money. If it doesn’t scare you, then you don’t understand what money is. Suddenly getting that amount of money when you are not at all accustomed to it is like taking starving POWs to an all you can eat buffet. It’s like giving someone dying from heat exhaustion water from a wide open fire hydrant.
Friends and family and no ones in particular will come and ask at your door until you are bitter and hateful of the world. You will have to learn to be alone as few other people have ever experienced. Long-shot gambits by shitty people with dreams of a slice of your winnings will endanger your family with schemes that could be as simple as diving in front of your car or go as far as kidnapping. You will find yourself stuck with the ethical challenge of losing your loved one or empowering these people with an irresponsible amount of money.
Without earning it on the way up (and I say this to privileged children as well), you will not have developed the measures necessary to keep your family and your sanity safe and intact.
But if the winner can manage all of that and still be a whole human with ethics and character intact, maybe they could do some real good. Because, apart from paying your legal share in taxes, that’s not going anywhere soon unless you want to buy a very small country and outfit the whole place with Wi-Fi.
There are so many people in this country with so many conflicting ideas. And really any one of them could win it. And whoever wins it wields all that power. I really hope it’s a good person.
-CG