I don't know about you, but when I buy a lottery ticket, I usually end up having a few nice daydreams about hitting the $400 million jackpot or whatever.

I don't know, I've never bought lottery tickets, I may only gamble token amounts of money at events where it is socially expected to do so.

So I would say that for me (and probably many other people), it's intrinsically rewarding.

Maybe I'm wired differently than most people, but what do you find rewarding about it?
We are not talking of something like tasty food or sex, which your ancestors brains were evolutionary adapted to seek since the time they were lizards, gambling opportunities did not exist in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, you need some high-level cognitive processes to tell a lottery ticket from any random piece of paper.

It's true that people have difficulties reasoning informally about low-probablity high-payoff (or high-cost) events, which explains why gambling is so popular, but gambling is also one of the few high-uncertainty scenarios where we can apply formal methods to obtain precise expected (monetary) value estimations. Once you do the math, you know it's not worth the cost.

But obviously you knew that already, so my question is, how can you still daydream about winning the lottery without experiencing cognitive dissonance?