If I Had One Wish…

Everyone has their own hopes and dreams and we’ve all thought about what we’d wish for if we were given a lamp with a magic Genie inside. Some think about really luxurious things like huge houses, exotic holidays and so on; while others think more logically and consider how they could use the money to improve their lives and those of their friends and family, by clearing the bills for example or taking the family to Disneyworld in Florida to our very own condo and a villa on an Aussie beach.

Some people think that they’d like to be professional footballers playing for their favourite teams, others want to be popstars or film stars. The dreams can go on and on, so I thought I’d have a closer, more detailed look at what people would do if they had one wish.

I was asked by the online lottery ticket company Lottosend to do a survey of 1,000 people from around the United Kingdom to find out what they would ask for, and there were a lot of predictable results and some quite surprising statistics that came up.

The top five responses were the kind of things we’ve all heard about quite regularly when we’ve had this discussion, either with friends or back when we were at school day dreaming. At the top of the list, with 7% of the vote was winning the lottery.

Next up was health, with just over 6.5%, closely followed by having lots of money (the value would obviously vary depending on your definition of ‘lots’). World peace was fourth and the top five was completed by happiness, which got 3.5% of the votes.

The views of men and women were slightly different in terms of priorities, as you might have expected. The men who took part in the survey favoured money and then winning the lottery, while the women put health above winning the lottery.

A particularly interesting result to have come out of the statistics was that the most popular wish was purely financial based, in either the form of winning the lottery or just having lots of money, until the point where those surveyed reached the age of 55. From that point onwards the preference turned towards being healthy.

Finally, we looked at the national responses. The survey included participants from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the preferences were again health and financial-based. The English (6.5%) and the Northern Irish (11.5%) would ask to be healthy with their one wish; while the Scots (8.1%) would ask for lots of money and the Welsh (a staggering 42.5%) wanted to win the lottery!

What would you wish for?