Is R40k a month enough?
Here’s a really interesting (and refreshingly short) TED talk by behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman. In it, he talks about happiness, and distinguishes between the experiencing self and the remembering self. Watch the talk to get the gist of it, but it’s a deceptively powerful distinction (deceptive because it seems so simple). The way that we experience happiness moment-to-moment, is very different to the kind of happiness (or lack thereof) that we might feel when we reflect back on our life. Interestingly, this reflection process is a process of story-telling (or story making), which reminds me very much of the underlying principle of narrative coaching…
[The title of this blog posts refers to a comment that he makes at the end of the talk. Apparently a Gallup poll on 600 000 Americans found that, above the level of R40 000 a month, income makes absolutely no difference to happiness. So that’s my new goal – make R40 000 each month and spend the rest of the time surfing…]