Lotteries, bets, Coca-cola and Octopus Paul

The mass of money invested in different forms of gambling (slot machines, bets, video poker, lotteries, on line casinos, and so forth) has been dramatically increasing in recent years. Just to take the case of Italy (and considering only the legal circuit controlled by the Government), people spent 17 billion euros on gambling in 2000; ten years later the figure had reached 53 billion - 2% of the Italian GDP. Such a dramatic increase runs alongside the socio-economic crisis that is affecting Italy as well as other Western economies. Thus, while one could expect that in periods of crisis people tend to refrain from spending resources on secondary needs, what happens is exactly the opposite: the more dramatic the crisis and the more uncertain the future, the more people commit to bets and lotteries- in so doing reducing the amount of resources devoted to primary needs. How can one understand this astonishing phenomenon? Above all, can such an understanding help us to model the process of sensemaking that sustains experience?