I had the opposite experience this week with an admittedly spendy colleague who always complains about how he will never be able to buy a house.
Migrant family, parents on the pension, and I figured money had always been tight.
Nope, his parents won more than $1 million in a lottery about 15 years ago, and spent and gambled the lot.
This explains the note of resentment he has when he talks about his parents and money. I would be seething.
Apparently, it's very common for lottery millionaires to lost almost all of that money fairly quickly. They get targeted by scammers, give in to wants vs. needs, everyone they know asks them for money. In some communities, you share something good when you get it. Everyone is going to need to rely on someone else at some point so there isn't the same sense of "This is mine and that is yours and if you run into trouble that is your problem" that middle class families have. If you happen to get a windfall, you celebrate and invite everyone to celebrate with you, because saving enough to make a difference does not seem possible and you might as well enjoy something when you can because hardship will come soon enough.
In my DW family, if she happened to come into any money at all (allowance, babysitting), her parents would ask to borrow it and never pay it back. You'd better believe she learned to spend that money on something she could consume / enjoy immediately real quick.
When you're talking about big money, like winning the lottery, it's pretty obvious that this is a bad strategy. But let's take something smaller, like a lottery ticket, which is statistically a really bad idea but which gives a lot of people a feeling of hope. If someone refuses to buy one lottery ticket a week, he will have saved $52 at the end of the year. It's good not to waste $50 but it's also not a transformative amount of money to save. I can understand why someone without great options might choose to buy hope with that $50 even if I would personally never spend it.