The point isn’t to shame my peers, nor is it that my grandparents generation was without vice, but that maybe there’s something robust about developing a culture of conventional wisdom as a fallback for an increasingly unreliable government? Maybe policy isn’t the only thing that matters?
In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope