Our national radio & TV broadcasting body sometimes surprises me with their sheer inane, witless, tweeness. "A surprising number of children have partaken some form of gambling before age ten" is the best paraphrase I can come up with from memory. The "reporter" then came up with the clickbait: "What do you think? Should this.(blah blah blah...) and do you think that (blah more blah blah) or (blah blah)?"
Think - and consider: It's a built-in survival trait. Now get over it. The problem isn't the daily gamble we all undertake just by waking up, it's bastards who take advantage of the fact that we've evolved this trait specifically to survive in a pretty random world.
This has come on the heels of a years-long advertising campaign where every betting agency ad comes with an anti-gambling message tacked to the end of it. ("What are you really gambling with?" etc.) People ARE gambling away the food and rent money, and it IS a problem. Kids are losing money on "mystery power-ups" on their phone games, and stealing to buy more. And that too is a problem.
But the real problem isn't with the human propensity to take risks - it's the human propensity to take advantage of - and money off - our fellow human.
Look at the gambling agencies' adverts on TV - those things cost money. No-one pays for tens of thousands of dollars' worth of TV advertising unless they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of the ads.
Most gamblers are hooked on the dopamine hits when they win a small prize back. Once they are, though, the realisation creeps in that the hits are too small, too far apart. Just like any other form of addiction, it's not a thing external to the body but the internal endorphins that are in play. That survival trait stuff.
Critters (and despite our mobile phones we're still critters on the inside) that didn't avoid dying didn't pass on their genes. There were two ways of dying prematurely, before begetting a breed of survivor critters just like yourself, and they are dying from not getting enough resources - like food - or not avoiding things that are bad for your lifespan - like predators or falls from cliffs.
The way to ensure your critterline would continue was to have some mechanisms to steer you towards hogging more resources and avoiding bigger predators. But if you were letting your fear of getting eaten deter you from the mission of stealing the food that the predator would eat if you didn't, and then your starved scrawny skellington, then your mission ended in a failure.
So we got reward endorphins for finding / obtaining the best food, and ardenaline rush to encourage you to avoid the predator and live another day. Plus, the endorphins you got when coming down off an adrenaline rush were to die for - not literally of course.
And in these times when money is as good as food and shelter as the reward, it's no wonder that a winning bet is that big rush, and (on the other side of the croupier's rake) also a big rush to grab some of that money right off another person. Whew! Wow! Weeeee! Did you see how much I just won?
While it seems unfair to you and me that some would take advantage of that inbuilt reflex in others to exploit them, to some others it's just the way - someone has money, you take more of that money from them than they're taking from you. The house always has to win.
Have I ever gambled? Hell yes. Have I ever lost more than I can afford? No way. Have I ever relied on gambling to survive? Never. Because there's always someone that's "luckier" than you. I have however played Lotto on occasion. I know I'm perpetuating a systematic scam, but there're endorphins in play for FSM's sake. I also enter some of those "give us your email and we'll put you in the draw to . . . " things. They get an email, and the ones I enter are usually provanbly legit, they get more value out of customer data than they're giving away - generally tens of thousands times more value.
So I don't see taking the occasional risk as the problem - I do see the exploitation of the mechanism that makes us risk-takers as lowlife.
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