The Powerball Lottery jackpot has reached a $1.5 Billion. I know because both my mother and my friend Craig mentioned it to me this week. Plus, it’s in all the news headlines.
About once every 5 years or so, I’ll play the lottery when it reaches some absurdly high record amount. After all, it’s only a few dollars and if I won, it would be worth it, right? And you can’t win if you don’t play they always say.
Except I always feel like an idiot after I play. I drop a few bucks and get no numbers. I never win anything – not even a free ticket or $2.
Since the odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 300 Million, I ran a quick calculation today to get a better grasp on what this really means. If I counted every second of every day it would take 9.5 years to get to 300 million.
My odds of winning are the same as any single second during 9.5 years. In the scope of all the time I’ve been alive, I could count to 300 million 5.5 times so far (assuming I started counted at birth and stopped today).
So, my chance of winning is the same as me randomly selecting any 1 second of my life and having it be the right time.
In other words – I have no chance of winning. It’s simple math. Everything else is a fantasy. And I’m not giving up even $2 for a fantasy that I have zero chance of ever getting.
Problem solved.