“Do you have the perfect life..?”

My day job (in media, dahling) means that I often get emails from journalists who are looking for case studies for real-life features in newspapers and magazines. A round robin email pinged through the other day, from a journalist on The Daily Mail.

QUERY: Do you have the perfect life? I am putting together a light-hearted feature
about a couple who fit the brief of a recent survey which describes the
‘perfect life.’…

Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? So are you wondering just what the officially perfect life might be? A happy, healthy family perhaps? Debt-free, bucolic bliss? Sunshine and giggles?

Um, no.

Here it is in full:

QUERY: Do you have the perfect life? I am putting together a light-hearted feature
about a couple who fit the brief of a recent survey which describes the
‘perfect life.’ This is an ideal opportunity to promote a business or
products. You need to be married, have two children, and now are able to
work part time when you want. You need to earn over £100,000 a year, and
ideally have an Aston Martin! Or you can have another luxury car. You need
to take fabulous foreign holidays, and have a lovely home. Please can you
EMAIL me asap and we will mention your business or products which have
allowed you to have this lovely lifestyle. Please can you EMAIL me asap.
Many thanks, [name].

A bit of digging around turned up the survey in question, commissioned by Sky Broadband. According to this, you have to live in a £1.6 million ($2.45 million) home, work part-time for £100,000 per annum, go on at least one exotic long-haul holiday every year, spend four hours a day with your family and have an Aston Martin in the driveway.

Tellingly, 85 per cent of the 3,000 Brits surveyed reported that they were dissatisfied with their lives and felt a long way from achieving their goals. Ha! I’m not surprised.

At first this perfect life request struck me pretty ghastly and depressing. Actually, it’s rather interesting. The only one of those boxes that I tick is the married one, but I’m pretty content.

Then again, my dream home is a country cottage and if pushed, I guess that my dream car is not a whizzybang sports car, but something reliable and small (so that I would be able to reverse park with minimal public humiliation).

As longtime readers will know, I lost my reverence for thingsthingsthings when I sold off a lot of stuff, moved to America and lived out of a suitcase for a year. If truth be told, some of my happiest times were spent with that single suitcase in tow, driving around the States with my husband in a beat-up Mercury Sable and living out of Super 8s.

At the same time, I have encountered plenty of people who have ticked many of the boxes on that survey – and who haven’t seemed particularly happy. I expect that you have, too. The link between material possessions and contentment has been carefully explored within the relatively new branch of economics known as happiness economics. Time and time again, studies have shown that even when people enjoy sudden good fortune and riches, they become no more content than they were before. As personal wealth increases, desires and expectations rise commensurately.

As Newsweek explains, in an old but excellent article on the topic:

The golden rule of economics has always been that well-being is a simple function of income. That’s why nations and people alike strive for higher incomes—money gives us choice and a measure of freedom. But a growing body of studies show that wealth alone isn’t necessarily what makes us happy. After a certain income cap, we simply don’t get any happier. And it isn’t what we have, but whether we have more than our neighbor, that really matters. So the news last week that in 2006 top hedge-fund managers took home $240 million, minimum, probably didn’t make them any happier, it just made the rest of us less so.

So for those 85 per cent of people surveyed, who said that they were dissatisfied with their lives, I fear that an Aston Martin in the garage of a spacious mini-mansion wouldn’t make much difference…

Image credit: ogimogi.