Is winning the lottery actually terrible luck?

What would you do if you won the lottery? It’s something we’ve all fantasised about, surely? Would the money go straight into property – a London pied-à-terre, a Somerset sprawl, an Italian farmhouse, perhaps? Sounds lovely. Or maybe you’d become a philanthropist, investing the cash in causes from rescuing kittens to curing cancer. Or, as in the new romcom The Ballad of Wallis Island, you’d spend it on something a little more niche, like getting your favourite musicians together to perform a private concert. That’s the dream, anyway. The nightmare is that you lose all sense of self and turn into a walking, talking cash machine, unable to trust anyone, and harassed over the spoils for the rest of your life.

When the news came this week that one ticketholder in Ireland had scooped a record-breaking EuroMillions lottery jackpot of £208m, all I could think about was the nightmare. Surely that amount of money, appearing in your bank account out of nowhere, can’t lead to anything healthy? At the risk of sounding like a harbinger of doom (or just jealous), nothing in life comes without a price. Case in point: this week, there were also reports that a woman who won a £6m mansion in a £10 Omaze draw has been denied the keys, and is now embroiled in a lengthy planning battle. Still, her life has changed beyond recognition overnight. “It’s just crazy,” Vicky Curtis-Cresswell told the press. “One week we’re worrying about our old car breaking down, the next thing we’ve got a £6m house.”

Stories of cursed lottery winners are a tale as old as time. One historic headline, about an incident in Paris in 1765, sounds more like a film noir plotline: “A baker and his pregnant wife murdered for his winnings by an employee.” More recently, there was British teenager Callie Rogers, who was just 16 when she won £1.8m in 2003 (a modest sum compared to the latest win). She gave hundreds of thousands to loved ones and later admitted to the papers that she feared people were only nice to her for her money. After it was all spent, she started working as a cleaner and moved back in with her mum, telling a reporter: “Now the money has all gone, I can find some happiness. It’s ruined my life.”

Victoria Jones, who won £2.3m with her now ex-husband in 2004, said winning the lottery was “one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me, without a shadow of a doubt”, adding: “People treat you differently – it’s just not a nice thing.” And Margaret Loughrey, who went from living on £71 a week to winning a £27m jackpot in 2013, struggled with her mental health after coming into fortune. She said: “I don’t believe in religion, but if there is a hell, I have been in it. It has been that bad. I went down to five-and-a-half stone.”

One of the more upsetting stories comes out of the US, where West Virginia businessman Jack Whittaker won a $315m (£234m) Powerball jackpot in 2002. Just 10 years later, his wife had left him, and his daughter and granddaughter had died of drug overdoses. He’d also been robbed numerous times – once, someone drugged him at a strip club and stole $545,000 in cash that had been sitting outside in his car. “I wish I’d torn that ticket up,” he later told reporters through tears.

These may be grim tabloid stories, but they do prove one thing: going public is a bad idea. The National Lottery’s official advice is for the new winners to “stay calm, get independent legal and financial advice and contact us as soon as they can”. Those who pose outside their home with an oversized cheque and a bottle of champers don’t stand a chance at being able to take a beat and think about how they want to spend their fortunes.

Staying anonymous seems to be the key to keeping things as chill as possible. And it’s striking to see how many choose to do so, in this list of the 10 biggest UK lottery wins to date – all from EuroMillions draws:

But whether you choose to tell people or not, the impact on your own psyche must be enormous. There aren’t many of us who’d get up at the 6.30am alarm, commute to work, and clock off eight hours later if we knew we had hundreds of millions in the bank. With all that money, where would you find your drive, your direction? Isn’t it telling that one of the first things therapists prescribe people who are depressed is routine and structure, to tackle apathy, something that having a job typically provides?

It’s no coincidence that so many aristocratic children, who haven’t needed to work a day in their lives, fall apart. If you have all the stuff you could ever want, then that stuff gets boring much more quickly, and you go to new extremes just to feel something. It’s human nature.

And there’s such a thing as too much money. Take Jeff Bezos’s impending wedding that’s about to bulldoze Venice. The excess of it all – including a megayacht the size of a football pitch moored in the Grand Canal – has left Venetians seething, with many threatening to jump into the waterways to block the festivities. And the tech billionaire’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez is apparently having 27 outfit changes. Is any of that actually fun or joyful? I’m not sure. Sounds tiring.

Of course, there are many instances where people have won the lottery and it’s transformed their lives for the better. One 2023 study by Joan Costa-Font at the London School of Economics found that winning the lottery might actually strengthen close relationships. The academic found that winners spent more time with their friends. Amusingly, they spent less time with their neighbours, the idea being perhaps that money allows you to socialise with those you really want to, rather than those who are geographically closest.

So, happy lottery winners do exist. But for a lot of others, isn’t it just, well, bad luck?