Let me present you a progress report of my job.

At the store, a new guy started working. In fact, two of them started rather recently. This has me very happy. One is already learning how to stock. I bought kneepads and nitrile work gloves (the ones that are technically disposable but found in the hardware store) for the explicit purpose of stocking days. They seem more than capable although experiencing a night shift with just one or even none by your side is the litmus test. When discussing the weakest point of cashiering for anyone trained as such, the consensus gravitates to a well-known fact of Bay State civilian commerce: the Lottery. While I deem myself in recovery from things like stimulants, isolationism, or playing video games too long (a matter of setting timers so you know when to wrap up and quit), gambling has never been that much of an issue. Last time I honestly sunk $25 into a few scratch tickets, I recouped that and $4 extra, all of which went straight into the Salvation Army donation pail on the counter. That was over ten years ago.

Yet, gambling as a societal dilemma often involves dopamine and routine, not wholesale ambition. It’s almost like work, in a sense, rather than outright play or entertainment. Once it becomes just that, it can be hard to shake yourself away. You never know if it will pay off, so you try again. However, this isn’t a full-scale negative. People who grow impatient with repeated failure or complicated tickets are prone to casting aside actual prospects simply because they either loathe the drudgery or misinterpret the signs. From this crucible of cognitive dissonance comes stories of enterprising homeless people savvy to the vicissitudes of certain scratch tickets that they collect and verify discarded ones, often finding winners and even full-on jackpots. It’s the same premise, that “it’s in there somewhere, just a matter of time and perhaps pattern recognition”, but the one with nothing to lose isn’t deterred by a string of failures.

Perhaps more applicably, look at how anybody operates when freed from societal expectations. When we go to a store to play numbers and draw lots, we simply want a kind of entertainment from whatever drudgery that transpires off-camera. So, when you bring that baggage over to the counter, the cashier will have that sensation of drudgery being released through the game you’ve chosen and, as such, will fumble more than a few times when trying to process the order. My store has a process of matching receipts to lotto purchases and transactions made via lottery winnings and won’t accept electronic transfers or cheques to buy numbers and scratch tickets; cash only. I don’t know if it’s state-mandated or company policy, but this is a security measure. The result is a series of transactions that become woefully complicated and stall a line of customers unless you work daytime shifts with an extra cashier present. Of course, if you work a shift with several people present, chances are you are left to your devices everywhere else in the place. What you do around the register while not on it becomes the determinant of your value to the store. Incidentally, I don’t buy scratch tickets to get away from work. I just work away from the register and do other things that need doing (still, I will jump straight on if the cashier signals for a back-up).

Alfred Adler knows why I bow out of lottery in favor of overextending my work ethic: I at least know what I am capable of, not what I should expect out of a scratch ticket. That sounds like I am a total anti-vice teetotaling snob. What if I am? Does that change the truth? I’m not even trying to vilify gambling. What I am vilifying is the supposition that history somehow fixes reality. We buy lottery scratch tickets because they might hold more coin than its base price, possibly a massive payout and the possibilities make us vie for that one payoff. Under no condition would the lottery exist if people bought them if the nefarious little slabs of cardboard were guaranteed losers every single time and, as a consequence, nobody would have engineered a lottery at all. Granted, the house runs the stakes and betting against it is not an appropriate fiscal policy, but, regardless, you might get a little slice for your trouble. Adler says that there is that infinitesimal shot for glory and you should not pass up opportunities by confoundedly assuming they will never exist because they somehow didn’t exist before. I’m not opposed to the existence of gambling–I’m opposed to people being irresponsible around gambling.

In essence, Adler wasn’t at all interested in seeing the world as rooted solely in past transgressions. In terms of psychology, he went another way from the Freudian approach of diagnosing the neuroses borne from historically documented and consequently recurring or even just habitual traumas that just somehow always manage to elude the sufferer’s best attempts at ameliorating. For Adler, he set all that aside and just asked what people are capable of, returning what we call “Locus of Control” back to a patient’s hands and thus bridging an unspoken gap between modern psychology and the philosophy of ancient Greece. “The Courage to Be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga celebrates Adlerian optimism and panache with a dialog between philosophy master and eventual pupil. The first critical, mental flaw of modern society is the obsession with predicting the future solely through an histrionic analysis of history. It breeds resentment and faulty cults of personality masquerading as economic models. Yet, the pupil brings up his hikkikomori friend, who wishes to escape the confines of his reclusive behavioral pattern; instead of worrying over what external miasma compelled him into it, he is better served by examining an internal and very current objective.

So, those two recruits? They’ll probably hate how abject addicts engage with the lottery. Everything else will be fine in due time, better still now that fresh blood is coming in. Maybe now the number of hours will thin somewhat or the magnitude of work or maybe the amount of assistance during daytime hours will improve. The best advice I could give them is, “Don’t be afraid to take the occasional heat from a customer; the slogan corresponds to market forces, not an entitled attitude.” Speaking of advice, maybe you should hunt down “The Courage to Be Disliked”, one of many in a series of books like Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People” that take cues from Adler’s reversal of “Why Does It Always Happen to Me?” (good Al Yankovic song). Yes, that is my advice. This is a blog on what you are suffering through, after all; my stories are just a springboard towards that end of the ocean.

Welcome to DesertIslandGamer.com, my blog of absolute bullshit artistry where I write as one with a like experience and world-view to the hikkikomori of Japanese contemporary societal mores (and folklore). My objective is to help the two of us escape this kind of pit, living to tell the tale if possible however inappropriate. I am somewhat out the door in terms of employment (besides the self-made version), but I have a long ways to go until I’m self-sufficient, self-assured, successful, and sandwiched between a ginger and a Japanese chick. Hopefully, your gambling with the search engine has allowed you to hit a jackpot. The blog is in its infancy as of January 19th, 2024 but, God willing, I will at least get you to crack a smile or perhaps laugh at the very least, or to assist with your quandary of isolation and social anxiety.

It’s not your past–it’s your power. Tap it and soon you will be well-skilled.

Good hunting.