Lottery

Have you heard of the HK$100 million Mark Six dream? Of course you have. Everyone has.

I'll confess it; I'm kind of tired of lottery winner frenzy. Maybe it has something to do with the earliest adaptation level theory study on overall life happiness among lottery winners.

This might not be news to you, but in case it is you should hear the experiment in which psychologists compared a sample of major lottery winners with normal controls, and also with paraplegic accident victims. At issue in this case wasn't the level of happiness immediately following the event (of the miserable accident or the lottery win). At issue was simply their effect one year after the event. In the end, the differences in happiness levels among the three groups were not as pronounced as we might expect. Both paraplegics and lottery winners were surprisingly close to normal levels of life satisfaction. What strikes me most about the study was that lottery winners took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events.

These ideas dovetail with my recent reading. In his book The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, Dan Ariely talked about how we get used to (with time) the euphoric feeling or painful experience. The point is that, in his words, even if you feel strongly about something in the short term, in the long term things will probably not leave you as ecstatic or as miserable as you expect.