You don't have to gamble for gambling to ruin your life
How gambling is eroding empathy, destroying relationships, and changing our culture — even for people who never bet.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about prediction market users making six figures betting on whether people would die in the Iran war. These are the same platforms that allow you to bet on how long the famine in Gaza is going to last, how many people Trump will deport, or if a nuclear weapon will be detonated by a certain date.
Now, take the following news stories:
(Source, source, source, source)
What does all of this have in common? It’s the depravity economy (a term coined by 404 Media’s Jason Koebler), or what happens when gambling infrastructure keeps expanding and nobody stops it.
It started with DraftKings and FanDuel, which spent huge sums lobbying states to legalize sports betting apps. Sports leagues and media companies legitimized the whole thing because they wanted the revenue and ad dollars.
Polymarket and Kalshi then took that model and removed the last guardrails — now you can bet on which countries Iran will launch missiles against on the same app where you bet on an NBA game or the Best Picture winner.
The “depravity” is that there’s no natural floor: Kalshi’s CEO contorted himself explaining how letting people bet on geopolitics and assassinations doesn’t technically let them “profit from death,” which tells you everything about where the incentives point.
And no one seems to be very interested in regulating it. Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor to Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket. His father’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission appointee, Michael Selig, has said he hopes prediction markets will “flourish” under his watch. The CFTC’s new Innovation Advisory Committee includes the CEOs of Polymarket, Kalshi, Coinbase, Robinhood, FanDuel, and DraftKings — with zero representation from consumer advocates or public interest groups.
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The depravity economy works, Koebler argues, because the U.S. government is only interested in regulating its perceived political enemies, leaving a vacuum where the Silicon Valley/crypto/hustlebro ecosystem can keep financializing anything — suffering included — as long as someone’s willing to take the other side of the bet.
This is all part of the same infrastructure — the one that lets you bet on regime change is the infrastructure that lets you bet on football from the bathroom at Thanksgiving dinner. And what that does to people — to their brains, their relationships, their capacity to experience anything without calculating their exposure — is particularly damaging.
Gambling doesn’t just destroy the gambler. It radiates outward — eroding trust, empathy, and the basic human capacity to watch something happen and just feel about it without calculating your exposure.
What gambling does to you
Most people know gambling is addictive. Very few treat it like they should.
Gambling disorder has the highest suicide rate of any addiction. And yet. When someone says their brother has a drinking problem, there’s often a cultural script for that — concern, intervention, rehab, meetings. When someone says their brother can’t stop betting on football, the response is more likely to be a shrug, or a joke, or “well, everyone does it.”
Part of this is normalization. Gambling (especially now) is woven into daily life in a way that something like heroin isn’t. The ads are on every broadcast. The apps are endorsed by celebrities, integrated into stadiums, promoted by the same sports media you consume over your morning coffee. When an activity is that pervasive, it feels … normal. Everyone’s placing parlays. Why would I be different?
Roughly half of men under 50 have a sportsbook account. 10% of men aged 18-30 have a gambling problem, compared to 3% of the general population. Gamblers Anonymous meetings across the country are skewing younger because of online sports betting.
Boys often grow up playing video games that use loot boxes — randomized reward systems that train you to spend real money on chance. They graduate into sports fandom, where every broadcast, every podcast, every social media feed is saturated with betting content.
Graphic from Betting on Boys
Jake Stika of Next Gen Men coined a term for this: “casino masculinity.” The fusion of risk-taking with male identity. Sports betting as a side hustle, a skill, an expression of expertise. (”I know ball” is not just bravado — it’s the psychological hook that convinces young men they have an edge over a system that is mathematically designed to take their money.)
But the engine underneath casino masculinity is about desperation. Young men are more economically anxious than any previous generation, with wages that haven’t kept pace with housing and education costs. They’re more isolated, with fewer close friendships and more parasocial relationships with streamers and influencers — many of whom are paid to promote betting apps.
They’re trained by digital life to crave immediate payoffs, making the delayed gratification of long-term investing feel impossible. And they’ve absorbed a version of masculinity that says your worth is measured in outcome — in wins, in returns, in being right when everyone else is wrong.
David Sasaki (AIBM): “It’s all part of a bigger trend, the gamblification of the financial life of young men. There’s a lot of anxiety, and betting is an escape, but it’s also a hope and a dream of striking it rich and attaining the glamorous lifestyles that young people see nonstop on social media.”
This is what makes McKay Coppins’ Atlantic cover story so unsettling. This is arguably one of the better-positioned people in America to not fall into gambling addiction. He spent months researching the science of gambling before placing a single bet. He interviewed recovering addicts. He talked to the researchers who study how the apps exploit dopamine pathways. The money wasn’t even his. He had every possible guardrail.
Coppins ended up losing $9,891. He told the Deseret News he was “hiding from my family in the pantry or in the bathroom to put bets in because I didn’t want my wife and kids to know how much time I was spending on this.” His family accused him of being addicted. His boss worried about his mental health. He ended the season by Googling “Virginia self-exclusion” to legally ban himself from betting.
If the apps can do that to someone who went in fully informed, imagine what they do to the roughly half of American men aged 18-49 who now have an active sportsbook account.
Americans legally wagered $167 billion on sports last year. In 2017, the year before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates, it was $4.9 billion. That’s a 3,300% increase in eight years. Ninety-four percent of those bets are placed online. You don’t have to drive anywhere. You don’t have to hand anyone cash. You don’t even have to put on pants. The friction that used to exist between the impulse and the act — the drive to the casino, the ATM withdrawal, the physical presence of other humans — is gone.
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Variable-ratio reinforcement — the same reward schedule that makes slot machines work — trains your attention to narrow around the next possible payout. Long-term thinking gets crowded out by minute-to-minute outcome monitoring.
On Fresh Air, Coppins said something that captures this: “To gamble on sports in 2026 is to almost inevitably become a conspiracy theorist. You can’t help but wonder — are there athletes who are rigging this game? Are there refs involved?” Gambling makes you poorer, yes, but it makes you more suspicious, more paranoid, less able to take anything at face value. It rewires how you see the world — from a place where things happen to a place where things are being done to you.
But nobody lives in a vacuum. And addiction — especially an invisible one — doesn’t stay contained.
What gambling does to people who love you
There’s a reason gambling addiction is called the “hidden addiction.” There’s no chemical being ingested, so there are no physical symptoms to observe. No bloodshot eyes, no slurred speech, no weight loss, no smell on the breath. There are just... changes. Bathroom breaks that last too long. A phone that’s always face-down. Irritability on Sunday nights that doesn’t track to anything visible. A savings account that should be growing but isn’t.
CNN’s feature on young men in gambling recovery is full of moments like this: A man named Shane — who had never gambled until New York legalized mobile sports betting in 2022 — found himself at Citi Field on Easter Sunday, alone, in 45-degree weather, with $25,000 on a game. He’d rented a car specifically so his family wouldn’t know where he went. When the Mets pulled ahead, he left early, drove to his dad’s house, and lied about everything. “You’re becoming a different person in front of people,” he said, “and they don’t even realize it.”
Source: The Cut
What financial therapists call “financial infidelity” — hiding financial behavior from a partner — is practically built into gambling’s architecture. Rolling Stone reported on a man whose girlfriend had no idea he gambled until his parents caught on. Another whose ex-wife found hidden credit cards. Another who, after a suicide attempt, was given his phone in the hospital — and immediately gambled away his last $100 while hooked up to IVs.
Gambling addiction produces a particular kind of personality change that partners describe in remarkably consistent terms: emotional absence, reflexive dishonesty, unpredictable irritability, and a flattening of affect — the person is physically present but psychologically somewhere else, running numbers, checking scores, waiting for a notification that matters more than the conversation they’re supposed to be having. The secrecy becomes its own habit, independent of the betting.
A University of Oregon study found that when states legalize sports betting, intimate partner violence increases by roughly 10 percentage points after upset NFL losses. Financial losses amplify emotional volatility. When your team loses and you’ve lost money on the game, disappointment metabolizes into something darker. And that darker thing goes home with you.
Prediction markets create the same relational dynamics, by the way. The obsessive monitoring, the secrecy, the emotional swings tied to outcomes your partner doesn’t even know you’re invested in — it all maps. Your partner doesn’t care whether you lost $500 on a parlay or on a Polymarket contract. What they care about is the action itself.
What gambling does to the people and events you watch
Last year, New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson told reporters that a fan had copy-pasted the word “die” a thousand times into his DMs. die die die die die die die. The threats extended to his infant daughter.
Lance McCullers Jr., the Astros pitcher, received messages from an overseas bettor threatening to find and murder his children — over a bad start. Liam Hendriks, the Red Sox pitcher, talked about fans telling him to hang himself after a game.
An NCAA study of more than 20,000 college athletes found that 51% of Division I men’s basketball players had received social media abuse tied to their performance, much of it from bettors. UNC’s Armando Bacot got over 100 DMs from angry bettors after his team won — they didn’t cover the spread. Scottie Scheffler, one of the world’s best golfers, deleted Venmo because fans kept sending him payment requests tied to his stats. NFL kicker Graham Gano said he gets told to kill himself every week.
78% of MLB players say legalized sports betting has changed how fans treat them. The Big Ten’s student-athlete commission wrote to the NCAA: “We are human beings over everything else — more than a jersey number, a stat line, or someone else’s wager.”
When you put money on an outcome, you don’t just add a “rooting interest” to your existing emotional relationship with the event. You replace one kind of emotional processing with another. Before the bet, an athlete is a person — someone doing something difficult and interesting, someone you might admire or identify with. After the bet, they become a variable in your portfolio.
Monetizing an outcome changes your relationship to the people involved in that outcome. The circuitry that processes care, identification, admiration — the part of you that feels something when someone does something extraordinary or fails at something hard — gets overridden by the circuitry that processes profit and loss.
Empathy requires a kind of imaginative attention: the willingness to see another person as a person, with their own interior life, their own pressures, their own bad nights. Gambling redirects that attention toward your own position. The other person becomes instrumental — useful or not useful, profitable or not, covering the spread or costing you money.
What gambling does to the rest of us
So what happens to a society when millions more people become gamblers? When hundreds of billions of dollars shift from savings and investment into betting? When the infrastructure built to monetize sports outcomes expands to monetize everything?
You get what we have now.
You get a country where for every dollar spent on sports betting, investment contributions drop by 99 cents. Where bankruptcy rates increase 25-30% three to four years after legalization. Where problem gambling helpline calls triple in states that legalize mobile betting, and the average age of callers drops.
But the economic damage — as enormous as it is — might not even be the most important part. The more corrosive effect is what happens to the collective capacity for unmonetized experience.
Consider what happens when prediction market odds start showing up next to news headlines. When a “yes” contract on regime change gets tweeted alongside footage of airstrikes. When the price of “Will Iran strike Israel on March 10?” fluctuates in real time while missiles are in the air. The event doesn’t change, but the way we process it does — and over time, the market frame crowds out the human one. You stop asking “Is this right?” and start asking “What’s the price?”
Senator Chris Murphy, who introduced legislation to ban prediction markets on government actions and war, asked the question that I think sits at the center of all of this: “What happens to us spiritually when every moral question in this country becomes a market? Don’t we lose something? Don’t we rot a little bit inside when the question of famine in Gaza isn’t a question of what is right and what is wrong, but whether you can make money or lose money?”
I was recently quoted in HuffPost about this very topic, and said “If you see the world as an increasingly transactional place, that often leads to not very empathetic or communal behavior.” The transactional frame doesn’t just change how the gambler sees the world. It changes how the world sees itself.
Derek Thompson called it “the casino-ification of America”: “Gambling hasn’t just taken over sports. It’s invaded culture, politics, and even international warfare.”
The same mentality has colonized how young people think about money in general. 31% of sports bettors now say they view gambling as an investment. Crypto traders show the same behavioral patterns as problem gamblers — obsessive monitoring, loss-chasing, borrowed money, secrecy. Meme stock communities celebrate holding to zero as an act of masculine defiance. The line between investing and gambling hasn’t just blurred. For a lot of people, it’s gone.
And the trust collapse is cumulative. Each scandal makes it a little harder to believe that anything you’re watching is real.
Lia Nower, who directs the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers, told the American Prospect that sports betting is where cigarettes were in the 1940s — “glamorized, normalized,” and completely underregulated relative to the damage it causes.
What we’ve already lost
CNN put out a call on social media asking to speak with young men who self-identify as “sports gambling sober.”
One was a man named Goerg. He’d nearly lost his life to gambling addiction. During the worst of it, he was a “VIP” at FanDuel and DraftKings — a status that came with a dedicated host whose job was to encourage him to keep betting. After getting sober, he couldn’t watch sports at all. The ads made him anxious. His friends still gambled, so he didn’t know how to be around them.
Goerg had been a sports fan since he was six years old, when his grandfather took him to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. He walked away with Charles Oakley’s autograph.
“They ruined that for me,” he said. “They nearly took that away from me.”
That’s what the gambling economy takes. The money and relationships, yes, but it also takes the ability to enjoy a shared activity in a country that’s running out of them. A place where you and someone with different politics, different income, different everything could occupy the same emotional space for three hours and feel something together.
The thing that’s replacing it — this ambient, always-on, frictionless extraction system that turns every outcome into a market and every person into a line item — is lonelier than anything it promised to be.
A Harvard researcher who studies gambling regulation said it takes five to seven years after legalization for a country to become “painfully aware of all the misery that increased access wreaks on public health, public finances, and so on.”
We’re at year seven, so, I suppose we’re right on time.
Excellent thinking & writing here, Ms. Horvath.
"eroding trust, empathy, and the basic human capacity to watch something happen and just feel about it without calculating your exposure." It was startling to watch a recent FailArmy compilation on YouTube that included a security camera clip of a restaurant kitchen worker falling on his bum while dropping a tray of food over himself. His 2 coworkers both act quickly- not to check on him or to help him, but to grab their phones out of their pockets and start filming. This is the modern world: the first instinct has become selfishness.
On a larger stage, our leaders no longer seem to view citizens as assets to be nurtured and improved, but instead as commodities to be harvested. One proof of this is the proliferation of legalized gambling over the last 50 years. Should governments save people from themselves, or should they provide all the freedoms people might want? The answer seems to be: whichever raises the most tax revenue, even if it means promoting vice which preys on pervasive and intrinsic human weaknesses.
I’m glad you touched on how it starts young. Loot boxes are banned in the EU exactly because they promote gambling. But now they are finding other ways to target kids. It so awful