2/25/2023 0 Comments A penny for your thoughts![]() It was a beautiful morning to be in the woods and children especially enjoyed the activities at Nature Playce, a special area where kids can play in the water, dig in the dirt and examine the occasional bug, beetle or spider in the wild. Heinlein once mused, “Thinking doesn’t pay.The long-awaited re-opening of the Hidden Oaks Nature Center was celebrated last Saturday with speeches, a ribbon-cutting, bubbles big enough to envelop a small child, crows, critters and even a barbershop quartet! Of course, as science fiction author Robert A. ![]() Assuming you spend this average and save everything else, it would take you 12 years to accumulate 240 million thoughts ($2.4 million worth). ![]() Bureau of Labor Statistics data tells us that the average American spends about $56,000 per year. Not accounting for future inflation/deflation, here’s how much money you’d stack up over time:Īccording to a Pew Research study, the average net worth among America’s 1 percenters is $2.4 million. Let’s assume you thought at a constant rate from birth to death. So, even if you did get a penny for literally every single one of your 25.5 million yearly thoughts, you wouldn’t even come close to the average top earner in our country.īut if you thought at a constant rate of 49 thoughts per minute 24 hours per day, you’d be able to join the 1 percent over time. In 2015, it took a whopping $450,000 per year salary to crack into the 1 percent. On the economic spectrum, a $255,500 yearly salary would place you in the top 4 percent of all earners in the United States - but you’d still be a far cry from the 1 percent. Our 69,984 thoughts per day would grant us a healthy $699.84 per diem - or an annual take-home of $255,500. We’ll also assume your brain thinks at a constant rate of 49 thoughts per minute throughout the day and night. Obviously, the idiom requires one to share said thought aloud - but since we want to maximize our thought to money conversion, we’ll count all thoughts (internal or external) here. Now, let’s assume that every time you have a thought, you get a penny. ![]() Let’s call it an even 49 thoughts per minute. (Again, these studies are not peer-reviewed, and only serve as a rough estimate.) Researchers at the lab conducted some rudimentary experiments with student test subjects and electrophysiological monitoring, and found that the average person has about 48.6 thoughts per minute. It remains unknown exactly how many thoughts we have each day - or what even constitutes a “thought” for that matter.īut there are some estimates out there, and the best one comes from the University of Southern California’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. Calculating thought incomeĪs of 2016, we humans have only scratched the surface of the science of our thought process. So, in our hypothetical situation, we still get one penny (in 2016 dollars) per thought. Unfortunately for us, today’s idiom remains the same: It has not taken inflation into account. Adjusted for inflation, it would amount to about 1.6 pounds, or $2.50 USD, today. When these texts were written, a penny was actually a considerable sum in England. Twenty-five years after More’s book, a playwright named John Heywood put together a collection of proverbs he’d heard over the years ( The Proverbs and Epigrams of John Heywood).īuried in its pages, beside gems like “Rome was not built one day” and “all that is well ends well,” was “a peny for your thought.” This text, from 1547, popularized “A penny for your thoughts.” “The Proverbs and Epigrams of John Heywood,” John Heywood, 1547 ’” The very first use in print of the idiom “A penny for your thought(s).” “Four Last Things,” Sir Thomas More, 1522īut it wasn’t really until 1547 that the saying gained any popularity in usage. “As it often happeth that the very face sheweth the mind walking a pilgrimage, in such wise that, not without some note and reproach of such vagrant mind, other folk suddenly say to them, ‘ A penny for your thought. In his text, he uses the saying to refer to a pensive vagrant on a pilgrimage: A brief history of the idiom “A penny for your thoughts”įirst used by English statesman Sir Thomas More in his 1522 book Four Last Things, the idiom “A penny for your thoughts” has retained the same meaning for nearly 500 years. And I couldn’t help but speculate: What if the idiom were economically redeemable not just for musings spoken aloud, but the thousands of rapid-fire internal thoughts that go through my mind each day? If I got a penny for every thought I had, how rich would I be? But the idiom - a penny for your thoughts - lingered. We struck up a conversation, then, two stops later, went our separate ways. Last weekend, as I was pensively staring into nothingness on the DC metro, a stranger approached me and said, “A penny for your thoughts?” ![]()
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