You were a gardener. Just like most of your friends. You didn't go to college. You barely graduated high school. You knew leaves and blowers and rakes. For years, very sadly, the State Lottery Commission took advantage of you, and more or less all of your friends, as you spent meaningful amounts of your savings buying lottery tickets, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars as a group. You didn't realize that lottery ticket-buying is an extremely bad deal relative to almost any other form of gambling...and, of course, relative to just putting that money in an index fund in the S&P 500.
But, of course, somebody has to win. And one day that was you. You won $50 million and went from poor to rich overnight. You thought life would be great, but your friends now treat you differently. It's a combination of awe with regard to your karma and resentment for your dumb luck. You feel bad, stressed, miserable, angsty. You thought money could buy you happiness. But it didn't. Welcome to SWS.
