"Lotteries are Stupid"

I was watching this episode of House, MD last night. Strange and totally unrealistic show, but captivating and exciting, none-the-less. The episode sort of surrounded some of the characters viewing certain aspects about their life or how they live their life and attempting to change it. Olivia Wilde's character was stubborn in her belief that we are who we are, we can't change that. It's born into us, and thus, "lotteries are stupid." Her mentality being that winning the lottery will not make you happier or make your life better, simply because how happy you are and how good you've made your life to this point is dependent solely on who you are as an individual.

This whole perspective sounded really depressing to me. I know I am not doing justice to the argument the show was trying to make (probably because I think it's very wrong), but I hope you get the point.

Now, I started off wanting to combat this with "I know tons of people that have changed their life around and are happier for it." When in fact, it's only 2 or 3 people, and everyone else sort of lives in this middle ground (like me) where we are mostly happy, but sometimes life gets us down, and then ideas like winning the lottery sound like great solutions.

And then I started thinking, maybe I just don't agree with Olivia Wilde's character simply because I don't want to. I want to believe that winning the lottery would change my life. I want to believe that making changes in my life that are good for me will directly affect my overall life satisfaction and help me to be happier. Now, I'm quite confident that winning the lottery won't make me happy... but it would sure go along way to quieting down some stress in my life. But it's like "they" say - you will always find something else in your life to stress about.

This discussion always leads me back to a truth I cannot yet live: Learning to be satisfied with what you have now, is the only way you will ever be happy. It is essentially the same idea as the point the show is making in that I don't believe our happiness is dependent upon things that happen around us. But I do believe we can change our attitude and how we approach life, and those changes within us - not around us- will have a huge impact on how happy we are today.

Now if only there was some magic formula that would help us figure out how to do that...