The issue isn’t pleasure, it’s expectation. Buying a coffee or a movie ticket reliably delivers the thing you’re paying for; a lottery ticket is designed to almost certainly deliver nothing. Calling that “financially inconsequential pleasure” glosses over the fact that the pleasure is mostly manufactured hope, not the product itself.

Enjoyment isn’t immune from criticism just because it’s cheap, and pointing that out doesn’t require living like a monk. You can acknowledge that people do it for fun while still recognizing it as a statistically bad trade-off compared to most other small indulgences