In this forum and other forums where gambling is one of the topics of discussion, one of the recurrent topics is people who write about how their gambling addiction has ruined their lives. We usually encounter topics like "Gambling ruined my life," "I lost all my life savings to gambling," "I gambled away my entire salary," etc. Then they go on to tell a sad tale. It makes me wonder: why do gamblers tend to wait until they have suffered a catastrophic loss or a string of losses before quitting or seeking help?
This is easy, some gamblers don't tend to realize what they are doing until something goes wrong, this is actually not something that is peculiar to gambling alone, it is something that is very common in other industries as well, for example, a criminal knows that what he or she is doing is wrong but might find it hard to stop, until the very day he or she is caught, then he or she start regretting and wishing he or she had stopped stealing earlier.
It is the almost the same thing with gambling addicts, some of them know that they are already spending too much on gambling, but controlling themselves is what they find difficult to do, and since it has not affected them negatively, they never bother to seek for help, until things go wrong, that is when they realize that they could have seek help earlier.