'If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn’t take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me.' Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA
What would you do if you discovered that you were the owner of the lottery ticket that won £64m, but you didn't claim it in time?
It would be nice to think you were big enough simply to be pleased that you had become the country's biggest philanthropist of the year by mistake, since at 11pm on Wednesday night, the unclaimed prize was handed over to charity. But I think most of us would be haunted by thoughts of what might have been for the rest of our lives.
Perhaps, but you don't need to have just missed out on a fortune to have dreams of "maybe … ". Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.
Bitter regret is the consequence of being more confident than we should be about where those alternative paths would have led us. The truth is that we will never know. What looks like good fortune can easily turn out to be an incredible stroke of bad luck and vice versa. Albert Camus got in a car going back to Paris instead of getting the train, only to be killed in a fatal road crash. Then there are the passengers who were running late the day of the London bombings of July 2005 and missed the tube or train journey that would have killed them.
If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don't have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn't take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me. I think about how I might spread the love, and worry that it would take away the incentive for someone to work at what might really give them satisfaction; or that they might spend the cash on things like cosmetic surgery or drugs that are no good for them in the long run. Meanwhile, of course, I trust myself to spend wisely, unaware of all the ways in which I too might screw up my life by making bad choices.
The point is not to convince ourselves that wealth brings misery, which is just an idea the rest of us cling on to make ourselves feel better. It's simply that we don't know what would happen in any given case, and so we should not mourn for an alternative future (or past), the outcome of which is mysterious.
If we really do want to turn our near-miss into a positive, then we should take it as a lesson about how fickle fate is. We often don't notice how many of the things that have gone right for us depended on chance events that could have been otherwise. If I think about my choice of university and subject, or meeting my business and life partners, things that set the course of my life, it is frightening how easily none of them could have happened at all.
My greatest consolation would come from an article I researched several years ago, in which I chased up seven members of two rock bands that had very nearly, but not quite, made the big time. For one, it probably came down to no more than a technical hiccup, meaning Simon Bates never played their single on the then biggest radio show in the country. All accepted that it would have been great to have broken through, although one was convinced it would have killed him, so seduced was he by the rock'n'roll life. But all had made their peace with their near misses and could see now that what really mattered was continuing to do what they loved. I thought I had written a great piece, but it never got used. Another "nearly" moment.
We can't control whether we are rewarded for our endeavours, with cash or recognition. It is not up to us how much cash or time we get on Earth, but it is down to us how we spend it.
It would be nice to think you were big enough simply to be pleased that you had become the country's biggest philanthropist of the year by mistake, since at 11pm on Wednesday night, the unclaimed prize was handed over to charity. But I think most of us would be haunted by thoughts of what might have been for the rest of our lives.
Perhaps, but you don't need to have just missed out on a fortune to have dreams of "maybe … ". Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.
Bitter regret is the consequence of being more confident than we should be about where those alternative paths would have led us. The truth is that we will never know. What looks like good fortune can easily turn out to be an incredible stroke of bad luck and vice versa. Albert Camus got in a car going back to Paris instead of getting the train, only to be killed in a fatal road crash. Then there are the passengers who were running late the day of the London bombings of July 2005 and missed the tube or train journey that would have killed them.
If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don't have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn't take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me. I think about how I might spread the love, and worry that it would take away the incentive for someone to work at what might really give them satisfaction; or that they might spend the cash on things like cosmetic surgery or drugs that are no good for them in the long run. Meanwhile, of course, I trust myself to spend wisely, unaware of all the ways in which I too might screw up my life by making bad choices.
The point is not to convince ourselves that wealth brings misery, which is just an idea the rest of us cling on to make ourselves feel better. It's simply that we don't know what would happen in any given case, and so we should not mourn for an alternative future (or past), the outcome of which is mysterious.
If we really do want to turn our near-miss into a positive, then we should take it as a lesson about how fickle fate is. We often don't notice how many of the things that have gone right for us depended on chance events that could have been otherwise. If I think about my choice of university and subject, or meeting my business and life partners, things that set the course of my life, it is frightening how easily none of them could have happened at all.
My greatest consolation would come from an article I researched several years ago, in which I chased up seven members of two rock bands that had very nearly, but not quite, made the big time. For one, it probably came down to no more than a technical hiccup, meaning Simon Bates never played their single on the then biggest radio show in the country. All accepted that it would have been great to have broken through, although one was convinced it would have killed him, so seduced was he by the rock'n'roll life. But all had made their peace with their near misses and could see now that what really mattered was continuing to do what they loved. I thought I had written a great piece, but it never got used. Another "nearly" moment.
We can't control whether we are rewarded for our endeavours, with cash or recognition. It is not up to us how much cash or time we get on Earth, but it is down to us how we spend it.
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