Losing More Than Bets
The profound poison of sports betting is even sadder than you think
“Football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
— Orwell, 1984
One night at university I was driving home from the gym with a sweaty smile. As I opened the house door and saw the roommates in the living room, a couple of them yelled that they had $180 on the game. I started dying laughing out of confusion. These were two guys who don’t gamble. They told me they were using free play from sports betting companies, available thanks to Massachusetts’ new online gambling laws.
“Hah, that’s how they get ya hooked!” I said as I headed to the shower.
The next night I was stuck to the TV watching an NBA game I bet $150 of “free play” on. As I reflected on my new addiction the benevolent FanDuel corporation gifted me, I thought about how there tend to be two types of sports gamblers. The first is someone who genuinely believes it is going to make them rich. Of course, there are rare exceptions, but in general there is extremely little hope this will happen. They do not even know they are a sucker; they think they’re “due.” The second, more common, is someone who does it for the thrill. This person knows there are better ways to allocate finances and dopamine, but views it as harmless entertainment. So what if you play around with a couple hundred in your account? What is the big deal? The obvious danger is that you could slip into a deep, serious addiction. But even assuming that doesn’t happen, it is still a big deal. The big deal is the opportunity cost when viewed in the long run.
I get the appeal, though. It’s simple. Sports are cool and making money is fun. The rush of winning in gambling is a wild feeling. I understand that. And I still watch tons of NBA highlights on YouTube.
But let’s consider an average NFL game you might watch, as if anxiously paying attention makes any difference for your wager, which lasts about 10,800 seconds. On top of that let’s say you spend one hour each week—3,600 seconds—evaluating and selecting bets. And, say, half an hour—1,800 seconds—throughout the week randomly thinking about these bets: the inevitable attention residue. That’s a total of 16,200 seconds per week used on these activities. Now, if you live to be 90 years old, you’ll have lived for approximately 2,838,240,000 seconds. If you gamble at the rate above, tens of millions of seconds of those nearly three billion are spent on sports betting. In my mind, using tens of millions of seconds of your attention in that way is a Shakespearean-level tragedy, albeit a much less romantic one. Of course the terrifying reality is that there is no guarantee you will live to 90 years old. Further, even “casual” gamblers spend much more time cooking up bets and watching games than in our example.
You can dismiss this opportunity cost. “It’s not that deep,” I can imagine people saying. No. That is wrong. It is that deep. Also, sorry, but you are literally making yourself dumber. How much more fulfilled would you feel if you didn’t invest so much of your time and emotions into the modern version of the Colosseum? Imagine if you were more focused on pursuits that gave you a real sense of meaning, rather than the hollow rush of boasting you had fifty dollars on Lakers -7? Imagine if instead of studying stats and records, you studied the great philosophers and scientists and poets? Imagine if instead of getting attached to pro athletes, you became attached to making yourself a better athlete? What would your life look like without these distractions? How much more proud of yourself you would be?
Maybe you’re nice with the bets. You have a solid P/L on DraftKings. You love sports. That’s cool. Seriously, again, I get it. Do you. I still find it sad that otherwise smart and ambitious guys use so much of their sacred attention in such a cheap way. Cramming their minds with relatively useless information that is designed to distract. Flushing away moments of this miracle of existence. Whining and complaining over a made-up game they have no control over played by strangers on a screen. They know more about the running backs with great vision than they do of their own vision for their future. They scream at a game with all their heart and soul without putting any heart and soul into their own pursuits and creations.
You have the choice! Captivity in this mental prison, where you can waste so much potential and screw with your emotions in the name of “fun.” Or you can wake up. You can develop discipline. You can renounce this damn manipulative profanity, and embrace the liberating adventure of instead betting on yourself.
This essay was originally published on January 9th, 2024.