Gambling, watching sports, and speed dating all have secondary motivations (earning money, tribal success, potential to spread your genes, respectively), but what's more is that these are all arenas of controlled and quite specific surprise. You know exactly the type of surprise that you are going to get, and the satisfaction you get from being right or the post-rationalization you perform for being wrong are both useful to the human. Contrast this to the "surprise" of a global pandemic, or massive social unrest. No one knows what's going to happen next and so you have a large contingent of people who are desperately trying to enact conservatism of the "move things back to normal" flavor. This is a stress response, and the stress is induced by not knowing what kind of surprises lay ahead.
The latter is the kind of surprise that is being minimized in the free-energy framework.