What does 運を消費していく mean?

Question

i'm asking myself what 運を消費していく means?

Context: My penpal won concert tickets and i congragulated him with おめでとうございます！ and he responded with ありがとうございます!!運を消費していく. Unfortunately i had not the time to ask him because he was busy. I looked it up and saw the literal translation is something like consuming luck. Is it an expression, because for me if i understand it correctly it means for i used my luck or something similar, am i right or wrong?

Answer 1

運を消費していく is not an idiomatic set phrase, and this ていく part strikes me as odd, too. Anyway, I think it should mean either "I've been consuming my luck (a bit too much just for tickets)" or "I will keep spending my luck (to win more tickets)!"

• 消費する is indeed "consume" or "spend". Unlike 使う, 消費 implies your luck will "run out" after you have used it. Of course this is technically illogical because "luck" is not something that can be stocked or consumed, but many people jokingly treat "luck" as if it were finite resource that decreases after some lucky event. If something really happy happened to someone, it's common to say 一生分の運を使い果たした ("I have used up my lifetime's worth of luck").
• (て)いく should be a subsidiary verb that means "gradually over time" here (see: Difference between -ていく and -てくる). If your penpal really said 消費していく instead of 消費した, it means 消費 is not a one-time event but a continuous action. That is to say, he is somehow expecting even more "lucky" events in exchange for his remaining luck, whether he likes it or not.