The boffins at the University of London’s Institute of Education have devised some monetary values of happiness:
If you have a fulfilling job, it’s worth an extra £40k of happiness on top of your salary.
Seeing friends and relatives is equivalent to a pay rise of £64k a year.
Chatting to nice neighbours is worth £37k a year.
Getting married is worth £50k a year.
And the biggy?
Excellent health is estimated to be worth £300k of happiness a year.
We sincerely hope you can tick some of the boxes above. Of course, it’s easy to pick holes or make cheap jibes (the researcher has clearly never met my wife, etc.). But the wider point about relationships and health is staggering.
So here’s a very big point: we are ingratitude spotters, fixating on all the stuff that we haven’t yet got. We spend oodles of hard-earned cash chasing trinkets.
Taking the argument to the extreme, you could trade in your family, friends, neighbours and good health and collect £491,000.
You’d be nearly half a million pounds richer but so much poorer.
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