Why Gambling and Day Trading Are Designed to Make You Feel Life Is Meaningless

By Kate Waycrest, Gambling Recovery Coach.

Three thousand years ago, the wisest man who ever lived sat down and wrote something that should stop every gambler and every day trader dead in their tracks. Solomon had everything. Wealth that makes modern billionaires look middle class. Power. Women. Knowledge. Every pleasure the ancient world could offer. And after exhausting all of it, he looked at the sum total of everything he had chased and said: "Meaningless. Everything is meaningless. What does man gain from all his labour at which he toils under the sun?" (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3). If a man who had literally everything concluded that chasing gain is a wind that cannot be caught, what makes you think your next bet or your next trade is going to fill the void?

Why Gambling Addiction Is Designed to Destroy Your Hope

I need you to understand something before we go any further. The gambling industry and the day trading industry are not neutral. They are not entertainment. They are not career opportunities. They are architectures of extraction, designed from the ground up to take your money, your time, your relationships, your mental health, your hope, and ultimately your life. And they are owned, spiritually speaking, by the enemy of your soul.

That is not hyperbole. I have written before about how the gambling industry generates over $71 billion in annual revenue in the United States alone, and how that money flows upward to corporations, governments, and lobbying groups who have a direct financial incentive to keep you addicted. The institutions that profit from your destruction are the same institutions that fund the "responsible gambling" campaigns that do nothing. They are the same institutions that block meaningful regulation. They are the same institutions that partner with professional sports leagues so your children grow up believing that betting is a normal part of watching a game.

And day trading is the same machine wearing a different mask. Instead of slot machines and poker tables, it uses candlestick charts and options chains. Instead of casino floors, it uses apps designed by the same behavioural psychologists who designed slot machines. Instead of "the house always wins," it whispers "you can be your own boss." But the result is identical: the systematic transfer of wealth from ordinary people to institutions, facilitated by an engineered illusion of control.

"I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind." (Ecclesiastes 1:14)

Gambling Addiction and Suicide: The Data Nobody Shares

Let me give you the numbers that the industry lobbying groups do not put in their advertisements. A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions by Moghaddam, Campos, Myhre, Reid, and Bhatt examined the relationship between gambling disorder and suicidality across multiple populations. They found that the odds of suicidal ideation among individuals with gambling disorder were approximately 3.4 times higher than in the general population. The odds of attempted suicide were approximately 4.2 times higher. And the odds of completed suicide were significantly elevated across every dataset examined (Moghaddam et al., 2021). These are not marginal increases. A person with gambling disorder is four times more likely to attempt to take their own life. Four times.

A 2020 study by Wardle and McManus published in BMC Public Health analysed data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey in England and found that people who screened positive for problem gambling were 15 times more likely to have attempted suicide than non-gamblers, after controlling for other mental health conditions. Fifteen times. That is not a statistic you can explain away with "well, they probably had other problems." The researchers specifically controlled for depression, anxiety, alcohol misuse, and drug use. Gambling itself, independent of those factors, was a massive predictor of suicidal behaviour (Wardle and McManus, 2020).

And in 2019, a Gambling Commission report in the United Kingdom estimated that between 250 and 650 gambling-related suicides occur in England every year. These are real human beings. Husbands. Fathers. Sons. Brothers. And every single one of them generated revenue for an industry that spent more money on marketing in a single quarter than the entire annual budget of every gambling treatment service in the country combined.

I have written about how gambling functions as a form of self harm. The suicide data confirms this at the population level. This is not an industry that sometimes causes harm. This is an industry whose business model depends on harm.

Why Day Trading Destroys Lives the Same Way Gambling Does

Day trading does not have the same volume of clinical research as gambling because it is newer and because the financial industry has worked very hard to keep it classified as "investing" rather than "gambling." But the evidence that does exist is damning.

A landmark 2019 study by Chague, De-Losso, and Giovannetti examined the complete trading records of all day traders in Brazil over a 12 year period. Their findings were unequivocal. Of all individuals who day traded for more than 300 days, 97% lost money. The median daily profit for those who persisted was negative $49 per day. Only 1.1% earned more than the Brazilian minimum wage. The researchers concluded that "it is virtually impossible for individuals to day trade for a living," and that the persistence of day trading despite these overwhelming odds suggests psychological mechanisms identical to gambling (Chague et al., 2019). This was not a small sample. This was every single day trader in an entire country over more than a decade.

A 2020 study by Barber, Lee, Liu, Odean, and Zhang published in the Review of Financial Studies examined Taiwanese day traders and found almost identical results. Less than 1% of day traders consistently earn profits after fees. The vast majority lose money persistently, yet continue trading. The researchers noted that the behavioural patterns, including escalation of commitment after losses, distorted probability assessment, and the illusion of skill, are "functionally indistinguishable from gambling disorder" (Barber et al., 2020).

And in 2021, Grall-Bronnec, Caillon, Humeau, Perrot, Remaud, Guilleux, Rocher, Sauvaget, and Bouju published research in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions specifically examining the overlap between day trading and gambling disorder. They found that excessive traders met the diagnostic criteria for gambling disorder at rates comparable to casino gamblers. The psychological profile, including impulsivity, sensation seeking, distorted cognitions about probability, and chasing losses, was statistically indistinguishable between the two groups (Grall-Bronnec et al., 2021).

I wrote an entire article about how day trading is gambling dressed up as a career. The research since that article has only made the case stronger. Day trading is gambling. It always has been. The only difference is that it comes with a laptop instead of a slot machine and a YouTube guru instead of a casino host.

"Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless." (Ecclesiastes 5:10)

How Young Men Are Being Targeted by Gambling and Day Trading

Here is what makes day trading arguably more sinister than traditional gambling in 2026. It is being marketed directly to young men as a path to freedom, success, and masculinity. Open TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram and you will find thousands of accounts run by "trading gurus" who film themselves in rented sports cars, rented penthouses, standing in front of private jets they do not own, telling 18 to 25 year old men that a "normal job" is for losers and that day trading is the path to financial freedom.

A 2022 study by Mills and Nower published in Computers in Human Behavior found that young adult males are the demographic most vulnerable to gamified financial trading apps. The study found that features such as confetti animations on trade execution, push notifications about stock movements, and simplified swipe-to-trade interfaces activated the same reward pathways as mobile gambling apps. The researchers concluded that these design features were not incidental. They were deliberately engineered to exploit the same psychological vulnerabilities that gambling exploits: impulsivity, sensation seeking, fear of missing out, and the desire for social status (Mills and Nower, 2022).

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) reported in 2021 that the number of new brokerage accounts opened by individuals under 35 increased by over 60% between 2019 and 2021, driven almost entirely by commission-free trading apps. These are not sophisticated investors developing long-term strategies. These are young men making high-frequency speculative bets on options contracts they do not understand, using money they cannot afford to lose, because an algorithm showed them a guru who promised it was the way out of a job they hate.

And the mental health consequences are real. In June 2020, Alex Kearns, a 20 year old college student in the United States, took his own life after his Robinhood trading account displayed a negative balance of approximately $730,000. The balance was a display error related to options positions that had not yet settled. He was not actually in debt. But the app's interface was so poorly designed, so optimized for engagement over clarity, that a young man believed he had lost three quarters of a million dollars and saw no way out (Tergesen and Zweig, 2021). That is not an accident. That is what happens when an industry optimized for user engagement encounters a human being in crisis.

Why There Are So Few Resources for Gambling Addiction

If gambling and day trading cause this much devastation, why are there so few meaningful resources to help people escape? The answer is simple and ugly: the institutions that could fund those resources are the same institutions that profit from the behaviour.

Governments receive billions in gambling tax revenue. In Canada, provincial governments collected over $14 billion in gambling revenue in 2019. In Australia, the figure exceeded $25 billion AUD. These governments are not going to fund aggressive anti-gambling campaigns for the same reason a tobacco company is not going to fund anti-smoking campaigns with any sincerity. The money is too good. The conflict of interest is absolute.

The financial services industry, which profits from every trade executed on its platforms through payment for order flow, margin interest, and options premiums, has even less incentive to warn people about the dangers of day trading. Robinhood's entire business model is built on the volume of trades its users execute. The more you trade, the more they earn. Why would they tell you to stop?

And the "responsible gambling" and "financial literacy" programs that these industries fund are designed to create the appearance of concern without actually reducing the behaviour. A 2019 systematic review by Livingstone and Rintoul published in Addiction Research and Theory found that industry-funded responsible gambling programs have no measurable effect on reducing gambling harm. None. The researchers concluded that these programs function primarily as a public relations strategy to deflect regulatory pressure, not as genuine harm reduction interventions (Livingstone and Rintoul, 2019).

This is why this blog exists. Because the people who profit from your suffering will never tell you the truth. The governments that tax your losses will never fund your recovery with any seriousness. The gurus who sell you courses on day trading will never show you the 97% of their students who lost everything. Someone has to say it plainly, without conflicts of interest, without corporate sponsorship, without caring about whether it makes powerful people uncomfortable. And that someone, led by the Holy Spirit, is me.

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

What King Solomon Said About Chasing Money and Gambling

Here is what Solomon figured out three thousand years before your trading app sent you a push notification. Every earthly pursuit, when it becomes your source of meaning, will leave you empty. Every single one. "I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labour, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 2:10-11).

That passage was written by a man who had more wealth, more success, and more worldly pleasure than any gambler or day trader will ever achieve. And he called it meaningless. Not because wealth is inherently evil. But because wealth pursued as the source of your identity, your security, your meaning, and your peace will betray you every single time. It is a counterfeit god. And I have written extensively about how the casino functions as a counterfeit church, offering a counterfeit version of the transcendence, purpose, and belonging that only God can provide.

The gambler sits at a machine for hours, entering a dissociative state that researchers call dark flow, not because he wants money, but because he wants to disappear. The day trader stares at charts all day, not because he is building wealth, but because the constant stimulation drowns out the emptiness he feels in every other area of his life. Both are chasing something they cannot name. And both are being systematically prevented from finding it by industries that profit from their desperation.

What they are actually looking for is God.

What a Life of Chasing Gambling Bets Actually Produces

Ecclesiastes describes it perfectly, and the research confirms it. A life spent chasing bets and trades does not produce freedom. It produces a very specific kind of person. Nervous. Miserable. Unfulfilled. Broke. Lonely.

A 2016 systematic review by Lorains, Cowlishaw, and Thomas published in Clinical Psychology Review found that 73.2% of individuals with gambling disorder had a co-occurring mood disorder, most commonly major depression. Over 37% had a co-occurring anxiety disorder. And the rates of substance use disorders were over 60%. Gambling does not exist in isolation. It creates a cascade of mental health destruction that touches every part of a person's life (Lorains et al., 2016).

Langham and colleagues published a landmark 2016 study in BMC Public Health that identified and categorized the full spectrum of gambling harms. The harms extended far beyond financial loss. They included relationship breakdown, loss of trust, social isolation, reduced work performance, job loss, criminal behaviour, cultural disconnection, emotional distress, shame, hopelessness, and suicidality. The researchers concluded that the total burden of gambling harm is comparable to major depressive disorder and alcohol dependence when measured in quality-adjusted life years lost (Langham et al., 2016).

"All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing" (Ecclesiastes 1:8). Solomon described the exact phenomenology of addiction three millennia before neuroscience identified the dopamine system. The eye never has enough. The ear never has its fill. One more bet. One more trade. One more spin. One more chart. The appetite grows but is never satisfied. That is not a pathway to abundance. That is a treadmill designed by the enemy to exhaust you until you have nothing left.

The Relationship You Are Starving for Behind Gambling

Here is the part that gambling recovery programs, trading mentors, financial advisors, and even most therapists will never tell you. The void you are trying to fill with gambling and day trading is a God-shaped void. It is not a money-shaped void. It is not a thrill-shaped void. It is not an ego-shaped void. It is a void that was designed, from the moment you were knit together in your mother's womb, to be filled by a relationship with the living God.

Solomon arrives at this conclusion at the end of Ecclesiastes, after cataloguing every meaningless pursuit available to a human being. "Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind" (Ecclesiastes 12:13). After trying everything the world had to offer, the wisest man in history concluded that the only thing that is not meaningless is a relationship with God.

I do not say this as a theological abstraction. I say this as someone who gambled compulsively for years, who knows what it feels like to sit in a car at 2am staring at a balance of zero, who knows the specific flavour of self-hatred that comes after a binge, who knows the nervous, miserable, unfulfilled, broke, and lonely person that gambling creates. And I say this as someone who found, through a real and living relationship with Jesus Christ, that the peace I was chasing through gambling was available the entire time. It was just never available through gambling.

The paradox of gambling is that the loss you are running from is actually the door to freedom. Because it is the loss that finally strips away every counterfeit source of hope and forces you to look up. To look at God. To admit that chasing the wind was never going to work.

Solomon had everything the world could offer and called it meaningless. The gambling and day trading industries promise you a fraction of what Solomon had, destroy your life in the process, and never deliver. The only thing that was never meaningless, according to the wisest man who ever lived, is God.

How the Enemy Uses the Same Strategy in Every Gambling Addiction

The enemy does not need to invent new strategies. He has been using the same one since the Garden of Eden. Take something God designed for good, twist it slightly, and offer it as a shortcut to fulfilment that bypasses the relationship with God that fulfilment actually requires. Money is not evil. Ambition is not evil. Risk-taking is not evil. But when any of those things becomes your source of identity and hope, it has been weaponized against you. That is exactly what the gambling and day trading industries do. They take the God-given desire for provision, for purpose, for excitement, for significance, and they channel it into a system designed to consume everything you have and leave you with nothing.

And the most insidious part is the silence. The lack of real resources. The absence of anyone in power saying plainly: these industries are destroying people and we are letting it happen because the money is too good. That silence is not an oversight. It is part of the design. When an entire system profits from your addiction, the system will never save you from your addiction. You have to be saved by something outside the system entirely.

That is why this blog exists. Not because I have all the answers. But because the Holy Spirit directed me to say out loud what the institutions are too compromised to say: gambling and day trading are demonic counterfeits of the provision, purpose, and peace that God offers freely. They are designed to steal, kill, and destroy. And the data on suicide, financial ruin, relationship breakdown, and mental health collapse confirms exactly what Scripture said all along.

The Hard Truth Every Gambler Needs to Hear Today

If you are reading this article, there is a reason. Maybe you searched for the truth about gambling because something inside you already knows it is destroying you. Maybe you stumbled on this while researching day trading because the losses are mounting and the guru's promises are starting to feel hollow. Maybe you are a parent watching your son throw away his future on options trades he saw on TikTok. Whoever you are, here is the truth that three thousand years of human wisdom and modern peer-reviewed research both confirm:

Gambling will not save you. Day trading will not free you. The next bet will not fix your life. The next trade will not make you whole. These are industries owned by the enemy, funded by institutions that profit from your destruction, and designed to lead you to financial ruin, psychological collapse, and suicidal despair. The data is not ambiguous. The suicide risk is 4 to 15 times higher. The loss rate in day trading is 97%. The industry spends billions marketing hope to people it is systematically destroying.

But here is the good news that Solomon spent 12 chapters arriving at: there is something that is not meaningless. There is a relationship that actually fills the void. There is a peace that does not cost you everything you have. His name is Jesus. And unlike the casino, unlike the trading app, unlike the guru, He does not profit from your pain. He died to end it.

References (Click to expand)

Ready to Stop Chasing the Wind?

If you have been pouring your money, your time, and your hope into gambling or day trading, you are not stupid. You are searching for something real in places designed to give you counterfeits. My CBT meets Christ recovery program helps you name the void, identify the enemy's strategy, and build the relationship with God that actually fills the space these industries have been exploiting. The first step is to read the framework.

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