# Gambling is Bad

Oct 24, 2025

What motivates people to work is simple.

> Will my life improve if I put in effort.

As long as you have a society where that’s not true, you will have a very demotivated workforce. This is why things like UBI are a terrible idea. If you are at the baseline and don’t see a walkable path to rise above it, you won’t.

The more the government or corporations randomly change policies day in and out, the more you feel like that your actions won’t improve your life, and if things do get better (or worse) it’s at the whim of a system much larger than you.

Gambling is the ultimate expression of this acceptance. Whether it’s casinos or crypto or lotteries or investments, you relinquish yourself to being an observer, knowing that it’s not effort that gets you ahead, but instead, impersonal luck.

The fundamental problem with gambling is that it creates no value. It’s completely zero sum, and that means in the long run in a society of gamblers everyone loses.

Additionally, when you win, gambling conditions you to believe this is how money is “made,” even when it clearly isn’t. If you made $100k in a casino on a hot run in one night, how do you motivate yourself to put in a year’s worth of effort to earn that?

I’m now a Hong Kong resident. I think people still have no idea how fake the US economy is, and how bad it will get over the next 20 years. I used to think that this was just a phenomenon in tech, but now tech is everything. If nobody is creating the value and everyone is trying to cannibalize, eventually there is nothing left.

> It’s a long road to redemption, and a shorter one to damnation
> – mgk

America has an amazing piece of land, and a multicultural civil society will rise again. But before it does, America needs to have a century of humiliation. History is going faster now, so maybe it’ll only be a score. You’ll know things are turning around when the money is real again.