Sex and sleep are nice, but money still makes the world go round

Not for the first time, I find myself looking at the results of a poll and thinking: who are these people? The latest source of bafflement is the 8,250 men and women quizzed on behalf of Sainsbury’s by Oxford Economics and the National Centre for Social Research about their levels of wellbeing and happiness.

According to their survey, having a satisfactory sex life and getting a good night’s sleep stand you in better stead than earning more money. Even a quadrupling of income (from £12,500 to £50,000), the researchers suggest, would only increase an average individual’s happiness score on their index by two points, while sound sleepers had a 15-point lead over bad sleepers and those satisfied with their sex lives had a seven-point advantage over those that weren’t.

Now, look. Sex is great and sleep is even better, especially when it’s not disturbed by someone who disagrees with your priorities insistently pressing up against you when you are on your way to eight hours of the dreamless.

But money beats everything, doesn’t it?

I’m not particularly materialistic, I don’t think – my husband has long been both awed and frustrated by the limits of my purchasing ambition, once calculating that fulfilling my every acquisitive desire between here and the grave would take a maximum of £30,000. I took this as a personal challenge and now have it down to 20 grand.

But money beats everything simply because it enables everything. I know sex and sleep are both technically free but who are these people who can relax enough to do either – let alone seven to 15 points’ worth – on just £12,500 a year?

The answer, I suppose, must be: people less hidebound and neurotic than me. The kind of lucky people who can use sex and sleep as an escape rather than consistently having to make them the first sacrifices on the front line of anxiety.

They’re probably the same people that like massages.

Until now I was always able to comfort myself with the thought that they were in the minority and the rest of us were staggering along as best we could, indulging in pleasant pastimes only when the rest of life lined up sufficiently to allow a window of opportunity. Now it appears I’m the unusual one.

Maybe it’s a middle-class thing. In fact, it’s almost certain to be a middle-class thing. I’ve never had to live on so little that the prospect of having nearly nothing (again) doesn’t frighten me, and I’ve never had so much that I have always been able to assume it will never run out.

I have what I earn and what I can save, and so I must always spend much of my mental and physical energy making sure I do enough of both.

Of course it would be wonderful if the results of this study were to be reproduced by other researchers, proving that we are far simpler, better, less avaricious and grasping a race than we have always been told.

But I suspect what it actually says is that we are chronically sleep-deprived and those few who are still managing to get their full quota of this vital activity appear so well next to others that they fly almost literally off the scale.

The rest of us have brains so addled that we cannot think straight – or rank other activities sensibly. I’d put money on it. Almost.