I started with small bets on my phone for fun, and now I check the app all day and chase what I lost. I keep telling myself it is just entertainment.

“Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase.”

Proverbs repeatedly contrasts two ways of getting money: slowly, through work, and quickly, through schemes. The observation is not moral snobbery but a pattern the wisdom writers had watched play out in real households. Money that arrives without effort tends to leave the same way, because nothing was built in the person alongside it. What quick money does to the one holding it is the real subject.

“But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

Paul is writing to a young pastor about wealthy members of his congregation, and the warning aims at the wanting rather than the having. His image is a snare, something that closes gradually while the animal stays focused on the bait. He is describing an appetite that grows by being fed, and the grief he names is not hypothetical. He had watched it happen to people.