I found a little article in Scientific American of April 2025: Is the Lottery Ever a Good Bet? – by Jack Murtagh.
It starts with this:
Here is a thought challenge for you: Let’s say I have chosen a particular moment in time from the past nine years. I am thinking of a specific (and totally random) year, month, day, hour, minute and second between April of 2016 and today. Could you guess it? No chance? You have a better chance of guessing a specific second from a nine-year span than you have of winning Powerball.
I thought that short quote was a very powerful visualization of the odds of the lottery.
Clearly, playing the lottery is never a good bet, but it’s not about winning. I know too many people in Germany who have spent their entire lives, since I was a child, buying that Lotto ticket every week, and they still do it now, even in their eighties. “One day I might win!”
The lottery is not about winning, it’s about dreaming. The dream of possibly winning gives people hope and encouragement, and a will to move forward, even in adversity.
It’s about the hope.