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There’s something peculiar about the soft hum of a slot machine. It doesn’t demand anything from you. It doesn’t challenge your decisions or interrogate your feelings. It just spins. It lights up in colours that seem borrowed from childhood dreams and neon nostalgia, casting a glow that makes everything else momentarily irrelevant. In cities and towns across South Africa, people sit in front of these machines for hours, watching symbols blur and reappear, fingers moving almost automatically, not to chase wealth, but to chase forgetting.
Grief is heavy, but not always loud. In a country where grief is often worn quietly, whether from personal loss, economic hardship, or the collective weight of generational trauma, people are constantly finding ways to live alongside it. For some, the rituals of everyday life offer solace, cooking, prayer, work. For others, the routine of the slot machine becomes its own strange form of therapy. The casino floor may not resemble a sanctuary in the traditional sense, but for those looking to mute the noise in their heads, it’s close enough. The machine doesn’t offer healing, it offers a pause, a liminal space where grief doesn’t have to be spoken, processed, or even acknowledged.
Inside these venues, no one asks why you’re there. No one probes your silence or the way your eyes linger just a second too long on the screen. In a world that often expects people to move on quickly, to return to function and smile on demand, slot machines are indifferent. They don’t judge. They don’t advise. They don’t interrupt. And for many, especially those without access to therapy or support systems, that indifference becomes comforting. It becomes routine. The act of pressing a button, of waiting for the reels to land, becomes a meditation in distraction, one that’s predictable, non-verbal, and deeply personal.
There’s also a kind of rhythm in gambling that mirrors grief itself. Both arrive in waves. Both involve long stretches of numbness broken by sudden, inexplicable emotion. And both are, in their own way, solitary experiences. The woman sitting alone on a Tuesday morning spinning five-rand bets isn’t necessarily hoping to win. She might just be hoping to feel something, anything, other than the absence that’s been following her. The man who returns every evening after work isn’t chasing riches. He’s chasing quiet. The kind that doesn’t come from silence but from the mechanical repetition of a game that requires nothing of him except presence.
This isn’t about glorifying the casino or excusing the risks involved in problem gambling. Those risks are real, and they often worsen the very pain people are trying to forget. But if we’re being honest, we must also admit that not everyone has another outlet. In communities where mental health care is distant, unaffordable, or taboo, slot machines are strangely accessible. They’re always open, always familiar, and always waiting. And sometimes that’s enough, at least for a while.
What makes this dynamic even more complex is that the escape isn’t always destructive. Sometimes, it buys people just enough space to get through the week. Sometimes, it keeps them from slipping further into despair. And while it may never lead to resolution or healing, it gives form to an otherwise formless grief. It lets people package their pain in timed intervals, between spins and screen flashes, between hope and disappointment, between remembering and forgetting.
In a country where the past is never far behind, and the present rarely allows time to pause, slots have become something more than just a game. They’re a mirror of how people cope when no one’s watching, when the pain is too old to name, and the world expects them to move on anyway. They don’t offer closure. They don’t promise answers. But they do one thing remarkably well, they allow people to sit with their sadness, quietly, with no questions asked.
And for many, that’s worth the spin.
