The success of Regis Philbin and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" not to mention uncouth cousins like Who Wants to MARRY a Millionaire? and Survivor, with its million dollar final prize, and Joe Millionaire and Who Wants to Marry My Dad? and uh, how we could go on and on! suggests that, if we could only win the lottery, i.e., become a bona fide millionaire, we could just settle down, take life easier, enjoy financial security and plumb be happy.

Yet try questioning those who have actually reached this plateau: a different story emerges. Real millionaires apparently dont even consider themselves wealthy, by and large. When it comes to stress, most have not really escaped the multitude of headaches the rest of us sub-millionaires wrestle with on a typical day.

On the first point, for example, a survey by Phoenix Home Life Mutual Company reports that todays millionaires do not consider themselves rich in the slightest, defining real wealth as a step or two above whatever is their current status The Phoenix researchers explain, Approximately half those individuals with a net worth of one million to four million dollars do not believe they will really be wealthy until they cross the FIVE million dollar plus plateau.

So a million bucks is no longer all that much, at least as far as those who have accumulated such largesse Are concerned. This is a long way from the olden days (specifically, the mid-1950s) when each week fictional billionaire John Beresford Tipton used to instruct his personal assistant, Michael Anthony, to deliver a bank check for one million dollars tax free to some unsuspecting recipient on national TV. Now, even a five-million dollar check might not be enough, since survey respondents also declared they felt they needed MORE than five million bucks to attain the lofty status of genuine wealth.

Even more instructive may be reflections from yet another study of high-income people, this survey carried out by Yankelovich Partners, on the effect of high net worth on personal feelings of personal satisfaction and stress. Had becoming wealthy made them any happier, they were asked? A near unanimous answer came rushing back: Not really.

The Yankelovich surveyors concluded: High-income individuals still feel time-deprived and under varying degrees of stress as they struggle to meet the commitments of their still busy lifestyles.

That TV series from the 50s (The Millionaire) worked because it implied the same thing. By following the lives of those who received the cool mill every week, more often than not, this drama implied that becoming rich, far from guaranteeing happiness, often led to more (or a different kind of) confusion, inner conflicts, relationship woes or outright calamity. The French say this: Plus ca change, plus la meme chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same. More mere money, even a million bucks, is rarely enough.