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Affects of Gambling Essay

Decent Essays

Affects of Gambling

In a world fraught by deadly ecological problems, the idea of discussing the future of gambling may seem frivolous. Yet it is far from that.
As a fundamental human activity, it deserves to be studied without cultural or religious bias for the key that it may provide to survival.
We have been fed a lot of myths about our wish for homeostasis, which is really a state of bovine contentment. To attempt to achieve this state we consume mountains of pills and rivers of alcohol. Somehow we seem to feel that if we can deny our essential humanity long enough, we can solve our problems.
When we attempt to grow, we are considered mentally ill, masochistic, or naive. Outworn Freudian or Skinnerian approaches to human …show more content…

Many elderly persons are passionate gamblers, called "elderly life seekers." What they seek is what most gamblers seek, involvement in the action. This is crucial to their sense of well-being in this society, which excludes them from the action of living and seeks to hide them away. Not only this, but while they play random games such as bingo and slot machines, they have an equal chance with the rest of the participants for perhaps the first time in their lives. While they play, they are wholly absorbed in the contest.
The implications of this are that gambling can stimulate the elderly to renewed interest in life, and that homes for the aged would do well to allow their residents to gamble, keeping them alert and stimulated rather than dull and tranquilized.
Moving from the retired to the working class, we find the importance of the gamble is still in the action. In this case, however, the working-class individual sees his participation as a means of surmounting impotence, of feeling that he has a hand in his own destiny. Having little opportunity for decision making in his job, he feels that if he wins he has in some way controlled his world; if he loses, it is simply a tough break.
Some feel

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