I tried searching for the best gambling stories and the ones that popped up were full of gambling recoveries. A lot of them highlighted of how gambling ruined their life but for some reason, usually one involving religion, they got better. I was expecting more of stories where a gambler won a significant amount. Extreme lucky kind of stories.
It got me thinking whether people think that gambling success stories can only be if you recover from gambling? Is that really the end goal? To rid of gambling as an activity?
There are couple of reasons why you don't hear as much winners stories as much as people having gambling problems.
One of them is that there's just so few people that made big wins. That's just statistics.
Other reason is because we are taught to believe that getting rich is always somehow earned by hard work or skills, so tragedy, failure and losing all the winnings appeals to us as moral story when it comes to gambling, even though according to
according to
studies, most big winners are doing just fine.
Weirdly that's not a good selling point for stories, as that narrative (money gives you happiness) doesn't give us the moral closure we believe in. It just creates envy.