Jared Dillian has this great essay, The Reason We Do Everything, from earlier in the year that opens:
Norm MacDonald, one of the funniest people to ever walk the planet, was also a degenerate gambler, busting out a number of times and going to zero. His therapist told him that he gambled in order to escape reality. Norm said, “That’s why everyone does everything.”
You should read the essay, but today I just want to zoom in on something Norm said. I watched the recent documentary Judd Apatow did on him (Netflix). Apparently, Norm was a heavy and eventually reformed gambler. Judd pulls the following quote from Norm’s 2016 memoir Based on a True Story:
Most people would think it’s the wins that keep the gambler going, but any gambler knows this is not true… When the red dice hit the green felt… and you’re declared the winner… you feel relief. Relief is all, and relief is fine, but hardly what a man would give the whole rest of his life to gain. It has to be something else… It is a particular moment, a magic moment that occurs after the placing of a bet and before the result of that bet. It is after the red dice are thrown but before they lie still on the green felt… As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.
At the seat of any good comedian’s observational power is a rare balance of sensitivity with cold logic. Norm is able to feel and diagnose simultaneously (his struggle to quit is a notch for philosopher David Hume’s idea that we are slaves to passion).
As you gaze at the horizon in 2026, dotted with inescapable metaphorical gambling billboards, I urge you to remember that their pitches are hacking an otherwise adaptive impulse just like Frosted Flakes hacks our predisposition to the muted sweetness of pre-industrial fruit. The impulse that’s being hacked is our urge to grow.
Celebrating short-term wins when you don’t have an advantage is like falling in love with the good cop during an interrogation. You are being manipulated. In the gambling sense, by chance herself. She’s an abusive partner who gives up the milkshake just enough for you to stay.
We need growth so nature wraps it in hope. Take the motion to gamble as a sign that you crave risk. Risk is good because it precedes growth. Risk involves failure. Failure leads to learning. Learning changes behavior.
Don’t waste the urge towards risk on a loop where the lessons of failure fail to compound towards durable knowledge that you can actually build upon.
Gambling addiction has always seemed to me like the “insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Norm humanizes why we are susceptible to it without taking the stupid low road that it has to do with innumeracy or anything like that. But as it increasingly gets hawked as something more noble (ahem, prediction), they are trying to bring it even closer to what constitutes growth and learning. I’m not against gambling any more than I’m not against freedom to indulge in most conventional “vices”. But big tobacco doesn’t even try to put Vitamin C in their cigarettes.
[Ha, ha I’m lying. They actually did.]