This is a letter to my father that he should never ever read

30/09/19

This is a letter to my father that he should never ever read.

Dear Daddy,

I admire you so much, you are such an inspiration, but some things that you do I just cannot understand and I completely disagree with.

Your life is perfect, and I am lucky to be born to someone so wholesome and so perfect. Your life is perfect, what more do you so desire? Say you play the lottery and you win a thousand grand. A few thousand grand. So what? You have that! you have a thousand grand. I know it. I also know the stock market is volatile, but you had it! And in a few years, maybe a couple decades you will have a paid off property worth over a thousand grand if the property market holds out.

Why do you sin? Why are you addicted to the lottery? A hundreds of dollars a week. I mean, I could make better use of that money! I want the best for you and your psyche and your constant desiring for something that is based on pure luck and is a statistical impossibility is unhealthy.

I kinda realise that belief in a divine kind of luck is based in religion. Religion that sells lottery tickets to patrons in order to raise funds for the organisation, through a process of bidding even. Religion that says that the burning of incense is the most important ritual, and that it is what is needed for the gods (yes, polytheism, wow, even polytheistic religions can be so toxic) to hear your prayer. But I do admire that in the 20^th century you were college educated and have a bachelors degree, this motivates me to better myself and be as successful as you were. But to think that someone who is college educated and does understand the cruelty of animal agriculture should support rituals that use the mutilated bodies of animals as an offering to the gods. And have such neglect for the environment.

And you are a mathematical genius, and I love it, so amazing in math and my inspiration. But how can someone so well versed in mathematics, to the extent of working in finance, believe in the lottery?

Sincerely, me.

I see a bit of religious intersectionalism at play. To be born of an ethnicity that combines two religions and thus has to justify one’s wrongdoings with the permissiveness of the other.

And what’s with my boldness? Perhaps it is Pascal’s Wager. The fact that many religions have a clause against the worship of false idols, yet the punishment of the ignorant disbeliever is less severe. And there are so many religions in the world. All just as legitimate, or illegitimate.

A Little Bit On Finance And Lottery

I may have mentioned before, or so I will mention, that I have taken an interest to investing and trading and the likes. It is partly inspired by the FIRE community, but lets not discredit my father, who has at least a 6 digit portfolio of stocks. And he once did day trading with forex for a while, and that was quite a nightmare, what with watching the market closely in the wee hours of the night.

Now, I too have taken an interest to day trading, and scalping, and very short term trades etc, and have explored a few paper trading games and apps and saw that it could be viable. (Well, even if I lose it is better than joining a pyramid scheme right?)

What I do not understand is why someone who appears so logical and does such rational things as investing (my father does short term investments of up to a few months) would also be attracted to and dabble in the lottery.

How do you live with yourself, helping such a sinister government? I get that civil service is lucrative, but I feel vomit at the back of my throat thinking that I have to face the idea that I am serving an employer that is so, so evil.