Lottery Winners

You know how it is a cliche that people who win the lottery end up A) as poor as they started and B) miserably unhappy in C) a humorously short amout of time? Of course. This is a sadly underexplored phenomenon, though. How is it even possible to blow through twenty million dollars in five years? I know someone will say, "People are stupid, Alex. They do stupid things, and that is what makes them unhappy."

I know that must be true on some level, but it can't be the whole story. I'd like to know, for one thing, what they spend the money on. Do they buy hundreds of new cars? Dozens of houses? Do they entrust all their money to a charitable foundation in a moment of stupid goodwill, or do they distribute it among their many friends and relatives? How could that make them unhappier than before? Charity is supposed to make you feel good and virtuous.

Do they invest it in pyramid schemes and lose it? Do they invest it in the stock market and lose it? It would be hard to lose money that rapidly, even in the stock market. I am really curious how you could burn through millions and millions of dollars in a few years. Someone should write a memoir. The problem is, people who have it together enough to write an account of what went wrong probably weren't stupid enough to waste 20 million dollars in the first place.

So maybe we need to do a more in-depth sociological survey. Has one already been undertaken? I doubt it. Once again, the studies that would be the most beneficial to humanity are the ones that are not being done. Give me the twenty million dollars, and I'll perform research to be proud of. And I won't waste it, either.