Let's make the case a category, which is an elegant way of disguising that what follows is an egotour, that is, a first-person story, although one, out of coquetry, prefers to consider it a social and moral experiment whose only object of study is a specimen of the human species who is at the same time and also the general director of research: me.
The subscriber never buys a Christmas lottery, so the only possible luck on this day in which the State rotates the drum every year so that fortune plays capriciously with the destiny of its citizens is that the tenth that my ancestors always acquire would be awarded. generously for each of his offspring.
But the challenge lies in not playing the number shared by the colleagues of the company in which one works, this one called La Vanguardia. It is not a recent custom but one established over three decades of professional performance and nine different companies, whose most notable difference, come these days, is that three of them entertained employees with a Christmas basket (good) and a day of coexistence. work (badly), and the others don't. But in all of them there has been a collective tenth in which employees can acquire shares and in all of them I have refused, year after year, to be part of that collective temptation and hope.
The experiment is a challenge to presence of mind and a challenge to the determinism of envy of other people's good and consolation for the common evil. Are we condemned to feel bad about the fortunes of others when it is not a shared fate? In these three decades, the test has never gone so far as to challenge one's belief in one's own good spirit, since at most one has had to congratulate one's fellow participants for some stone throw or a modest fifth prize. Nothing that really tests the fortitude that one likes to boast about.
If at the time you read this piece there is a news story illustrated with a photo of the central editorial office in Barcelona uncorking champagne on the front page of our website, it is possible that the subscriber is the laughing stock of the team or the object of hasty condolences between toasts for not having taken part in the fate of everyone else – well, not everyone, since one is aware of some other silent dissidents – and that in turn the journalist who tomorrow wears my boots has a different mood a bit more gloomy than the one that lords it over at this time of Thursday evening. But I do not think so.
There are several reasons for having maintained this strict resistance to the acquisition of what is known as the “company number.” The first is the same one that allows one not to let oneself be soaked in pain or guilt for the sufferings of the planet without giving up responsible and militant empathy. That is to say, it is pure emotional discipline that, over the years, is executed without any effort.
The second is the certainty that trying to plug the possible channels through which frustration penetrates is like trying to retain water in a basket. If you acquire a tenth of the company on the defensive, you will have to do the same, for example, with those in the bars you frequent or with the numbers played by groups of friends, organizations of which you are part or family and that is a chain of containment of endless misfortune. If you have to choose to say enough is enough at some point, why not before starting that path.
The third is less rational, it is purely superstitious: one has been blessed with such a number of fortunes throughout one's existence – starting with the main one, which is being born (the alternative scares me) and having done so in this time and in this region of the world – who suspects that excessive material ambition can break the delicate balance of the informal agreement by which one does not ask too much of life and in return it does not ask too much of one. I already said it was nonsense.
And the fourth is a challenge to all of the above because coherence and soundness of judgment are attributes of Newtonian physics, not of the human condition. And the sooner you get off that donkey, the more peaceful you will be, I promise you. So when betting on a card, the Christmas Lottery prize seems like a meager reward for the faith and hope that you claim as a deposit. In other words, the day this objector decides to become a client of those State windows called “Lottery administration”, he will surely acquire tickets for some raffle whose prize is a figure so obscene, so irrational, that allows him to look over the shoulder of the CEOs of the investment funds that own the Ibex companies. If not, why?
