Hi, and welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about money and happiness, specifically, how much does your ideal day cost. Money and happiness is a complicated topic. Many of us tend to fall into two categories. We tend to believe more money equals more happiness.

Or we take the position that money doesn't buy happiness. As with most complicated things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The research does show that happiness increases with an increase in salary, but often only up to around $70,000. But that also depends on the culture you're in, the relative income in your area, and even how much your neighbors are making in relationship to you. Other research shows that having more things doesn't necessarily make you more happy, but experiences do.

And one could make the argument that more money means more experiences. So we can hold that as a possibility as well. The main point is there are a lot of variables that go into the relationship between happiness and money. But I want to give you something to think about that may simplify this exploration for you. And that is to think about what your ideal day looks like, and we're not talking about chartering a boat off the coast of Italy for $50,000 a day.

Yes. That might be an ideal day, but there may be a time and place for that in a more luxurious setting once or two times in a lifetime. More realistically, when you think about what gives you fulfillment or in the last year, what was the day that really felt nourishing, aligned and full to you. What did that day look like? And it's an interesting exercise to do, which you could do after the meditation today because when we really start to map it out, we see that the ideal day often involves, you know, conversation with friends, it might involve doing something we enjoy, it may involve a round of golf or some sort of activity. But a lot of these things, at least in my experience doing this reflection with myself and others, a lot of these things don't cost that much, or at least as much as we think we do when we imagine in a more abstract way what our ideal day would cost.

We might need certain baseline things that fit into the ideal day. You know, like a, a certain home that allows us to relax on the couch or a park nearby that we can take our dog to, or throw a Frisbee. So there may be some foundational things like that that costs more and are important, but more often than not many of our most fulfilling days are much more simple than we realize. So my encouragement to you is, once we finish the meditation, is if you have some time to sketch out some of the key things that lead to a fulfilling day for you. That if you were to just have more days like that, that life would feel better.

And then look at how much does that day cost. And what would you need to do? How would you need to reverse engineer from there to have more of that or that amount of money? As I already mentioned, there are lots of variables to consider in the conversation around money that we can't fully address here. But this reflection may help give you a more concrete sense of, of what you actually need to feel fulfilled and how to best allocate resources rather than subconsciously chasing some luxury ideal that was instilled in your mind through culture or childhood Hollywood movies. So it's just something to reflect on, on your journey of developing a meditation practice and a mindful and fulfilling life. So thanks so much for your practice, And let's settle in for today's meditation.