Altered Life

Winning The Lottery isn't always all it's cracked up to be

I didn't tell anybody.

Instead, I called in sick from The Mill. Then I hired a financial advisor. He advised me to establish a trust and recommended an attorney. Once we had established it, we moved the winning lottery ticket into the trust. Then, and only then, did "the trust" claim the winnings. Five billion dollars. The attorney advised me not to visit the lottery commission in person. Instead he went on "the trust's" behalf. This way there was no publicity, no photographs splashed all over the newspapers, and no hype. Just life altering money. In an eyeblink, my family suddenly had generational wealth. I'd done everything right. Nobody needed to know, The Little Guy finally won one. I didn't tell a soul.

Word got out anyway.

I immediately considered the good I could do. Parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles - all of them would get a clean slate. The ones with houses would no longer have a mortgage. The ones who didn't have a house would get one. Their credit cards would all be zeroed out. College? On me. They'd receive an additional windfall, of course, but I hadn't figured out the rest yet. I could give a few million each to the American Heart Association, the SPCA, Operation Homefront, and countless others. Not the Komen Foundation, though, they're a scam - The American Cancer Society would get a donation instead. The high school marching band would find themselves bunch of new instruments, that's for sure.

I did spring for a new car. Even before winning, it was time. My old beater was held together with chewing gum and bailing wire, and I'd already been saving for something safer. Instead of a Maserati or something fancy, I got a Tesla Model 3. I loved the futuristic design. The political junkies could argue all day about the environmental impact of lithium mines vs fossil fuels, but I didn't care. This thing might as well be dragon powered. Plus, I loved the futuristic touchscreen controls. Unfortunately, the day I bought it I stopped for groceries, and it got vandalized. Cameras caught two ladies (I use that term loosely) in a Subaru with a Coexist bumper sticker who got triggered at the mere sight of the vehicle and keyed "eat the rich" into the side. Half the pickup trucks in the lot cost more than my Tesla, but they didn't care. So much for "tolerance."

Before I got home, my phone exploded. I couldn't finish one call before the next began. It was an endless barrage of "friends" and "family" that I hadn't heard from in years conveniently reaching out to say hello. Half of them suddenly had financial hardship they wanted to tell me about. The rest suddenly had these grandiose visions of businesses that would make millions if only they could just get off the ground. Many these people lived for years on disability with phantom injuries. Many more had never held a job longer than six months in their life. The worst part was, every single one of them got angry at me when I didn't promise them a million here or a million there.

When I did get home, I found my neighbor in my driveway. I'd waved at him before in passing, but he rarely waved back, and we'd never actually spoken. I could tell he knew. He started to say something, but I interrupted and told him I needed to use the bathroom. Thirty minutes later, he was still outside.

Once inside, I sat down, exhausted. My life had already changed ways I never expected. All these people felt entitled to this money as if it was theirs. Just because someone they barely knew had a stroke of good fortune, they felt entitled to it. I kept coming back to that word: entitled. Why did they feel this way?

I knew all I'd done was buy a lottery ticket. I didn't invent anything. This largess wasn't from hard work. Yet where do you draw the line? It was a rapid education that people are very good at spending someone else's money. Who were they to tell me how to spend it? Why should Billy from third grade be rewarded for all the spit-balls on the bus after school? Yet there he was, reaching out to me on the socials. There were already hundreds of new followers on Instagram. They couldn't all be freeloaders but that's exactly how they behaved. I could give 75 cents to every man, woman, and child on the planet and the only thing that would change was I'd be broke again.

Now that I had something worth protecting, the money made me exactly that: protective. They would all drag me back down if I let them. Worse, this behavior made me bitter. I hadn't changed, but their treatment of me did. The moment The Little Guy finally got a break, they turned on me. Suddenly I was "greedy." I still wore the same clothes, liked the same music, and had the same values, yet it no longer mattered. I could give away every penny and I'd still be "greedy" because I didn't give it to them.

For days, I couldn't leave my house. I turned off my phone and deleted my social media. It got so bad I snuck away in the night and checked into a hotel. Eventually I bought a penthouse apartment in a distant city where I could be anonymous - just to escape.

The altered life wasn't all bad. I met new friends who moved in a different financial circle, and they turned out to be wonderful people. They worked just as hard as anyone at The Mill, but most of them worked with their brains instead of their hands. Best of all, they didn't want anything from me. Yet I missed my old life. I missed my friends. Most of all, I missed what they were before the money brought out the ugliness in them.

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996 Words