I Thought I Was Winning the Game... Until I Realized I Was Just Rebuilding Myself

I used to think the glow of the lanterns meant fortune was mine.

Every night, alone in my Brooklyn apartment, I’d open the app—not for money, but for silence. The rhythmic chime of each round felt like a temple bell from Shanghai’s Spring Festival: brief, sacred, predictable. My mother called it ‘luck’; my father said ‘control.’ But neither understood what I was really chasing.

The data says the house edge is 45.8%—cold numbers dressed in algorithms that don’t care if you cry.

I watched players place bets like offerings at a lantern-lit altar: \(10 here, \)100 there. Some chased streaks—three wins in a row—as if fate were a drumbeat they couldn’t stop. One woman posted her screenshot with tears in her caption: ‘I just needed to feel something.’

This isn’t gambling.

It’s ritual.

We don’t play to win—we play because we’re tired of being heard.

The platform calls it RNG-certified fairness—but fairness doesn’t fix loneliness.

When the screen dims and the last chip fades into silence, I remember my grandmother saying: ‘The ox doesn’t run from luck… it walks with it.’

So now I sit here—not betting on outcomes—but building them.

One day at a time. One breath at a time.