Category: gambling

The Woeful Encouragement of Slothful Behavior

“There’s always been the drive to encourage people to gamble, to smoke, to drink, to eat (and quite a lot of eating), or for prescription pills, but I don’t remember a time in my life where it was so present or in your face.”

It seems as if lately popular advertising and commercials are geared towards encouraging ‘slothful’ or lazy behavior. How many times have you seen marketing focused on satiating one’s appetite whether that’s for sports betting, general gambling, fast food, alcohol, or other forms of indulgence?

Instant gratification seems to rule the day in terms of today’s popular media and advertising, which didn’t use to be case as much in past years. There’s always been the drive to encourage people to gamble, to smoke, to drink, to eat (and quite a lot of eating), or for prescription pills, but I don’t remember a time in my life where it was so present or in your face.

Now, I have nothing against people indulging here and there especially as responsible adults and I do think moderation rather than total abstention or condemnation of legal indulgences should be preferred in terms of popular messaging. However, I don’t believe it should be as prominent as it is today or as how much it is in our faces today without any serious acknowledgement of how addictive or abusive these behaviors can be.

For example, sports betting and gambling used to be quite limited to in person casinos or only certain areas or jurisdictions where it’s legal, but now it’s widespread and being actively encouraged through big business and even with live updates on betting possibilities during many sporting events. Yes, there is messaging about gambling or betting addictions but those kinds of preventative messages about the dangers of that kind of addiction are heavily outweighed by how easy it’s become to place a bet or multiple bets, and how openly encouraged it has become by the mass media. It used to be much harder to bet or to gamble especially on sports and it required a real effort or at least something you had to do in a physical location or area, but now it’s captured the digital world and can take milliseconds to make a bet or place a wager.

I do think it is a morally troubling area in our society now, where sporting venues, companies, or sports TV channels are encouraging sports betting and gambling and while it’s legal, I do think many young people, especially young men, are being taken advantage of as a result. While I encourage legal pursuits of pleasure and sustenance for food, drink, or gambling, what I do not like is how pervasive it has become and how it can become predatory with the amount of advertising, marketing, commercials, and societal pressure that is being put on people to indulge as much as possible and as often as possible.

There is a clear difference in my view between making something legal to do and making it overtly available and powerful as a lobby or industry. With addictive behaviors around food, drink, gambling, or other pleasures, there must be stricter regulations involved especially surrounding how big business these areas are and how much advertising and marketing can be done for them and in which venue(s) or place(s). There has to be a much better job done with enforcing limits, regulations, and where the advertising can be done. I also think the dangers of addiction need to have more airtime or attention as a result if these behaviors are to be marketed freely.

Similarly to smoking, restricting where you can smoke, increasing the price for smoking cigarettes, cigars, or vapes, and then placing strong notices about the physical harms of smoking has helped regulate that kind of industry successfully in my view without making it entirely illegal or condemning it fully. People can still smoke responsibly but they know today more than ever the dangers involved and the risks to one’s health as well as it being an addictive habit. You also don’t see as many commercials or advertisements for smoking as you did twenty or thirty years ago. You still do have the advertising to some degree, but I think it’s an area of our society where the regulations, awareness of the risks and dangers, and the potential side effects are quite clear compared to other vice industries today.

Additionally, if it can be done for what was a titanic industry like smoking cigarettes and other tobacco products, there is no reason why those same regulations and rules can’t be brought in for advertising of gambling, sports betting, prescription drugs, unhealthy foods, or alcohol. There has been a lax recently for those industries especially for prescription drugs, which the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world, which allows TV and radio advertisements for prescription drugs. Many of these drugs may be approved by a regulatory agency but the actual side effects and risks are not clearly stated in public advertising and the risks are also not known to potential customers as much as they should be. Like those prescription drugs being advertised freely with the side effects and risks being shortchanged in advertising, that is where we are today with legal sports betting and gambling.

I do think there has to be more action taken to regulating these growing vice or pleasure industries with less advertising out in the open, more acknowledgement by those companies selling these services on the clearly known risks and addictions and making sure that the sports teams or venues themselves and the TV / radio partners cannot market these companies either. Fast food, alcohol, and increasingly legal marijuana are also areas of vice that could do a much better job of highlighting their risks of addiction, abuse, or the dangers of too much use to one’s health.

Lastly, with better regulation of vice industries, there should be a countermovement in my view of encouraging healthy forms of behavior in our popular media and advertising. Yes, you have some advertisements for the gym or health clubs, but rarely do you see healthy foods being advertised or how to be mentally fit in difficult times, or how to have use better judgment in our financial lives, our relationships and friendships. These kinds of messages may need more public service announcements (PSAs) rather than your typical free market advertisements, but companies and especially the popular media should be encouraging people to both be healthier mentally and physically overindulging in vices that when not moderated, can encourage slothful behavior.

Where we are today as a society in our popular media is not healthy. Instead of openly encouraging these vices, we should be prioritizing healthier behaviors and more productive uses of our time. I’m not using against these legal vices, but I think their presence has been too much, too soon, and there needs to be more regulation of them in popular media and advertising going forward.

While these vices are fun for people to indulge in responsibly, the messages corporations and individuals are sending us are too much in terms of encouragement of these vices without equally talking about potentials risks, harms, or negative consequences of possible abuse if not carefully used. I hope we can start to encourage more positive forms of media and advertising with regards to keeping people healthier, fitter, and with better behaviors in how they both spend their time and their money.

A Roll of The Dice

“There is always going to be a risk involved when rolling the dice or making the choice in life as there is when it comes to choosing one of two possible decision or even one of multiple decisions.”

When many of us think about versus chance, the English expression, “A roll of the dice” comes to mind. When you are faced with two or more choices and you must act, it’s like rolling the dice and hoping to get lucky in a table game at a casino. There is always going to be a risk involved when rolling the dice or making the choice in life as there is when it comes to choosing one of two possible decision or even one of multiple decisions.

Life involves a lot of non-linear choices to make and that inevitably involves taking chances on it. There’s no bigger example for me of taking a chance metaphorically than the rolling of a dice like at a craps table. Dice can have multiple choices on them or two choices only, one of which that it will land on, the other it will miss, but there is only one outcome without any alternative once the dice stops rolling.

Many of our day-to-day decisions involve choosing, taking that action, and going in one and only direction after the decision is made like the dice being rolled. While we would like to choose both options to see where they lead us, the chances of doing so are unrealistic and impossible. Like the dice that we roll, in life, we only can choose one of two or more possibilities. Dice can have more than two choices and while your standard dice has six sides to it, life usually has us choose between more than a few options as well with only one possible choice being the outcome to follow.

The metaphor of rolling the dice is apt when you consider that for the average person, choice overload leads to indecision or no decision at all. The most stressful part of a person’s day is not making the choice itself but rather when they are not given a choice or if they have too many choices to choose from. There is real fear and anxiety in people thinking they made the wrong decision and if they have multiple choices, the likelihood of feeling stress goes up because the choice is not simplified, and they must weigh different outcomes rather than just two or a few of them.

When the choices we have in front of us are two or four or six, we suffer less from ‘analysis paralysis’ or from indecision itself. While you can still second guess yourself later, if you are still able to think your decisions through and make an educated guess or choice, you won’t feel as stressed or anxious. I think that’s why the adage of ‘flipping a coin’ or ‘rolling the dice’ appeals to people because sometimes, the randomness and leaving it up to chance is better than putting actual effort into our decisions.

That’s partly why gambling is such an intrinsic part of most cultures in that you can still act by flipping the coin, rolling the dice, pulling the lever, but you don’t have any real choice to make because you’re leaving the choice up to someone else like an algorithm, a card dealer, or fate itself. People like autonomy over their decisions but they also enjoy leaving things out of their hands and letting ‘fate’ decide what happens next.

Of course, ‘fate’ usually has its outside influence on the choice that is made whether that’s the wind gust blowing the coin on a different side you expected, the casino letting the algorithm or computer decide who wins or who loses, or more generally, the environment around you that has an impact on the outcome. Fate itself is not without its own influence on the outcome so if you think that there is anything in this world that is truly impartial or just unbiased to the core, I tend to disagree and believe that whether it’s leaving things up to ‘chance’ or ‘fate’ itself, nothing is ever truly random in its consequence and that no outcome is without its own chance of interference.

You may have rolled the dice, pulled the lever, tossed the coin, picked a card from a deck, but there are other factors at play that keep ‘fate’ from being truly blind in its outcome. Even when leaving things up to ‘chance’, you still acted up until that point and the fact that you put yourself in that situation means the outcome itself afterwards even if you call it ‘fate’ was a consequence of your actions only but it is rather true instead that the immediate environment, the people around you, and a number of other external factors that had an influence on the ‘fate’ of that outcome.

Rolling dice, playing cards, and gambling give people a thrill because your action can lead to random winnings or losings but that’s basically the illusion of it all. Fate in life like a rolling of the dice may seem random but there are outside factors in place that may seem like it was ‘destiny’, ‘fate’ or ‘random luck’ but involved several actions, decisions, beliefs that led to the present moment.

Instead of trusting in ‘fate’ to guide us or for our choices to always be led to pure ‘chance’, we lose the power of our choices and the education of our decisions. We cannot always leave things to ‘chance’ and must look beyond picking randomly or choosing out of a hat to guide us in life. While I disagree with taking on too many choices or nitpicking every decision you make, you must always be thinking things through, educating yourself, and being willing to learn from your mistakes.

Choices inevitably cause consequences, both good and bad, and we cannot foresee where our choices may lead. However, if we leave too much up to ‘fate’ or ‘luck’ as we call it, then we will never really mature or grow as people. People should do their best to have autonomy over their decisions and to not take them lightly. Yes, it can be fun to roll a dice or flip a coin to make our choices, but life is too serious to be gambling on our choices like that. Rolling the dice may seem like an easy way to go through life like picking random numbers out of a hat but that’s not how the real-world works. When we evaluate our choices, think through decisions that have big consequences, and trust in our believes to guide us through the consequences of those decisions, we will be better off as individuals for having taken control of our lives rather than leave it all up to ‘chance.’