My lottery fantasy is being able to travel back in time and inject my lottery-playing uncle with MMM serum. This guy, who used to be really fun and my favourite uncle when I was a kid, started putting $30 into lotto tickets every week out of his paycheck in his 20's. He has always lived in his parents' basement except one year when he married some lady twice his age, trading his parents in for her to take care of him, which obviously didn't work out so well. He was a high school dropout and most of the time had a job but always minimum wage or low paying. He makes a decent salary now, as manager of the grocery store that's .4 miles from their house that he still needs a car to drive to and back from every day, but for some reason he never has any money. He does have an amazing amount of computer equipment for his gaming in his basement lair, as well as a great home cinema system with surround sound and such. And he upped his $30 a week lotto investment to $50 a week in his 30's. Now he's in his 50's, still spends $50 minimum per week on lotto, though sometimes it's up to $150, as he's getting worried about wasting his life (finally!) since his folks, my grandparents, are having serious health issues and he himself now has heart problems related to obesity and borderline alcoholism. Once, in my teenage years, he won $4000 from the lottery and he was so excited he came and spent the weekend at our house and threw a big party, I remember we all ate and drank like kings that weekend, lol, and he put a down payment on some sort of convertible car shortly after. He STILL thinks he'll win the lotto one of these days, because he's put so much money into it it HAS to have raised his chances of winning right?! Surely his dedication will be rewarded in the long run. Meanwhile, we figured he's spent over $100k conservatively on lotto tickets, maybe won $8k in all which is always blown on stuff he wouldn't have spent money on to begin with, and if he'd just invested the same amount in Vanguard or something, he'd be a millionaire today.
Instead, he's in his 50's, lived a life where he can't get a girlfriend and has social issues because he lives in his parents' basement, his own health is failing, he worries about how long he can work for because his body can't handle standing up all day, and he worries about his parents dying or having to sell their house to go to a retirement home because then he wouldn't have a place to live, so he treats them like crap and verbally abuses them when they ask for help because he feels so trapped and put upon that he's also invested decades of his life living with them and mowing their lawn for them free of charge and he's realised that as his parents inch up to their final years before death, he's going to lose his security. He just talked them into leaving him their house in their will so he'll get that, but now he's disgusted that he's forced to do things like help Grandpa in his wheelchair move outside so he can sit and watch the squirrels and birds during the day, and help move him back inside later, and has to deal with a home nurse coming in who helps with the less savoury things. He's so unhappy with his situation that he's doubled down on his lotto playing and brags about all the research he's done on which types of tickets have the best odds of winning and the percentage of each type he buys as he's honed his strategy over the years, and reassures us that he'll take us all on a huge blowout family vacation when he does finally win the lottery.
It would be funny if it weren't so fucking sad. Sigh.
So yeah, I fantasize I could time travel back to the healthy happy carefree fun loving young 20's uncle of my childhood and slap him silly and magically upload all the MMM tools he needed into his brain back before he ruined his life and stained the lives of so many around him. It's not the lotto's fault obviously, but his idiotic belief in his personal luckiness and ability to get rich someday contributed hugely to what a waste his life has been. Some people just cannot learn though. He'd rather still believe than think he's made a huge mistake all these years, and so thousands each year continue to be sucked into the black hole of the lottery, because one day it'll all pay off.