What do you do when you can do literally anything? My gut feeling is that, over a long enough period of time, the answer to that question is ‘go insane’. How do you find meaning and structure in your life when your needs are already met and you could achieve nearly any goal as a trivial task? This is not a question most of us will ever have to deal with. We have to work because we need food, to eat. Our goals take perseverance to achieve, because we’re all so fucking busy doing that last thing I just mentioned.
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The select few people that actually have to deal with this problem fall neatly into two categories. The first is billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, who — through a combination of luck, business nous and other people’s labour — have become so wealthy that the only way they can feel joy is by hunting people for sport on South American islands that they pay NASA not to include on satellite maps. The second is lottery winners, people who have by and large been working their asses off like everyone else, only to find out that they don’t really have to do that anymore.
Can a human find purpose if it’s not tied directly to their material needs? If not, can a human being happily exist without a sense of purpose? Luckily, you and I will never have to think about this, unlike an unnamed Chatswood dad who just won $96,040,000 in a lottery draw.
The Sydney officeworker, who wishes to remain anonymous, got a call a today informing him of the win. According to The Lott, this is the transcript of the moment he received the news (asterisks theirs):
“You’re sh*ting me!” he exclaimed after a moment of stunned silence.
“I can only say holy sh*t.
“Jesus Christ! I’m at work at the moment so I wasn’t expecting this phone call.
“I’m shaking. I’m just waiting for someone to tell me I’m being punked.”
He seemed pretty convinced that he was about to fuck work off forever after this point: “It’s unlikely that I am going to finish the day out at work. I’m pretty sure I’ll quit. My endless lunchbreak starts now!”
Yeah look, fair enough.
The man said he plans to take an “outrageous holiday” after taking out the Jackpot Prize in the Lucky Lotteries Mega Jackpot, which he won on a single random numbers entry.
This is the second-biggest win for an individual in Australian lottery history — the first-biggest was taken out by a Sydney woman earlier this year, after she a won a not-to-be-sniffed-at $107 million.
