A still from the Tving original series “The Ordinary Jackpot”TVING
Choi Hoon
The author is a professor of psychology at Hallym University.
A lottery jackpot. Few phrases stir the imagination quite like this one. Even people who have never bought a lottery ticket have probably wondered what they would do if they won.
But the Tving drama “The Ordinary Jackpot” offers an unusual twist to the conventional fantasy. Its protagonist wins the prize but keeps showing up to work as though nothing happened. He himself changes instead. Once unable to say unpleasant things and constantly worried about what others think, he becomes more candid and confident, which naturally earns him greater recognition at work.
The lottery did not give him any abilities that he lacked. He had spent years working harder than anyone else. But the money gave him something to fall back on, and he could finally recognize his own worth. The windfall does not transform his underlying competence. It gives him enough psychological room to clearly see the person whom he had already become through years of effort and perseverance.
Each day, we learn and get things done. That is true of university students who spend their youth building credentials and of adults who pour themselves into work. We say that years of effort build competence, but we are remarkably reluctant to acknowledge the value of the experiences that we have accumulated during that time. We readily accept the principle in the abstract but often fail to apply it to our own lives.
An unstable society makes it especially difficult to look squarely at our own worth. When simply getting through each day feels precarious, our anxiety about what could go wrong comes first. Like the attentional bias toward threat described in psychology, our minds react more readily to signs of possible failure and danger than to what we have already achieved or what we may be capable of. In the end, the shadow of failure obscures the abilities that we have built over many years.
How sad would it be if we could believe in our own value only after receiving an enormous stroke of luck, such as winning the lottery?
In real life, the sense of security that the jackpot gives the protagonist should come from a social safety net that anyone can rely on. Our task as the older generation may be to leave the next generation a society in which people can trust what they have painstakingly built, even without extraordinary luck and even after several failures.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
