Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Compared to New York, incomes and cost of living are another 10-20% higher again in Zurich, but 20-25% lower in London, Paris and Sydney, and 60-80% lower in Shanghai.
Compared to the US as a whole, incomes in the UK are about 40% lower, and cost of living is about 10% lower.
This suggests that $75,000 in the US is on average equivalent to about £42,000 in the UK, or about $115,000 in New York.
As of 2023, the average college graduate in the United States can expect to make about $77,000 per year over their working life, while the average Ivy League graduate earns over $120,000.
In the UK, college graduates earn about £52,500, and amounts are similar in Western Europe and Australia.
The upshot is that if you're a college graduate in a high-income country, then there's a good chance you end up in the range where more income has little effect on your happiness.
Many people tell us they want to find a job that isn't stressful, and in the past, doctors and psychologists believed that stress generally was bad for us.
However, the most recent evidence on stress suggests the picture is a bit more complicated.
One puzzle is that studies of high-ranking government and military leaders found that they had lower levels of stress hormones and anxiety than other workers, despite sleeping fewer hours, managing more people and having more responsibilities.
One widely supported explanation is that having a greater sense of agency shields them from the demands of the position.
In other words, if you're facing a stressful project, but you get to decide how to go about tackling it, it's likely you'll feel much better than if you're being micromanaged.
Likewise, a stressful project that'll only last one week might not be a problem, while one that lasts for two years certainly could be.
People are also much better able to tolerate stress if it's in pursuit of a goal that they consider meaningful.
In total, researchers have found that the following seven factors are important moderators of stress and can even turn a situation that's draining into one that's engaging and meaningful.
The intensity of the demands, the duration of the stressor, how much control you have over how the work is carried out, whether you have the resources and power necessary to tackle the work, your degree of social support, your mindset and whether you see the stressor as an opportunity or a threat,
And finally, how meaningful you find the task.
This research points to a very different conclusion about how to approach stress.
Having a very undemanding job is actually bad.
It's boring.
But at the same time, facing demands that exceed your abilities is also bad because that causes harmful stress.
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