Long life | 19 September 2012

Who wants to be a millionaire? The answer is practically everybody. Who wouldn’t want a life of financial ease in which every need was affordable? But since the vast majority of us will never achieve this blessed state, we try to persuade ourselves that it is not such a happy one. When people believed in God, they could take comfort in the prospect of a happy afterlife. But now they must convince themselves that here on this earth they are no less content than the very rich.

Unfortunately, this is not easy. We know that great wealth doesn’t necessarily bring contentment — the tragic case of Eva Rausing is a recent example — but most of us feel that we would know how to handle it, that we would spend our money wisely and generously, and that we would stay the same decent, level-headed people that we have always been. So try as we may to pity the rich, we usually find ourselves envying them. And despite the encouraging examples of lottery winners ending up bankrupt or committing suicide, it is apparently the case that most of them are much more cheerful after their enrichment.

This was the conclusion reached, after extensive research, by Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick University, who said last year: ‘Although many people don’t want to hear the evidence, it is overwhelmingly that winning the lottery makes you happier and improves your mental health.’ So my purpose this week is to generate cheer among those who are not as rich as they would like to be and to persuade them that they are perfectly all right as they are.

There is nothing to be said for poverty, of course, but if you are comfortably off — have a decent house, can afford to educate your children, take holidays abroad, go to the cinema, own an iPhone, and so on — what have the very rich got over you? It was set out in Cole Porter’s song — the ‘country estate’, the ‘supersonic plane’, the ‘gigantic yacht’, the ‘fancy foreign car’ — but, as the song said, who needs them? For apart from such wholly dispensable ‘extras’, the comforts and pleasures enjoyed by a Russian oligarch are little different from those available to, say, an NHS doctor (unless he yearns for the devotion of a young supermodel).