I’ve been diving into an interesting discussion about Australia’s ranking on the Local Purchasing Power Index, where apparently we sit at a respectable fourth place among developed nations. The LPPI measures what you can actually do with your salary rather than just raw numbers – basically, how far your money goes when you factor in the cost of living. It’s a more useful metric than just looking at average wages in isolation.

I’ve been mulling over something I read online recently - a simple observation about families at a local park that’s really stuck with me. Sometimes the most profound moments are the ordinary ones, aren’t they?

The story was beautifully straightforward: someone watching their kid at a playground on a sunny winter’s day, taking in the scene around them. There was an African dad kicking a football with his children, an Asian father doing the same with his kid nearby, a Middle Eastern family enjoying a picnic while their children played. Kids from all sorts of backgrounds - European, Indian, you name it - just being kids.

The James Webb Space Telescope has just dumped 1.5TB of data onto the internet, creating a searchable database containing imagery of nearly 800,000 galaxies. Eight hundred thousand. Let that sink in for a moment while you’re sitting there with your morning coffee, worrying about whether you remembered to put the bins out or if your teenage daughter will actually clean her room this week.

Someone in the comments perfectly captured what I’ve been feeling since this news broke: “I feel incredibly small, but filled with wonder.” That’s exactly it, isn’t it? There’s something profoundly humbling about being confronted with the sheer scale of the universe, yet simultaneously exhilarating. It’s like standing at the edge of the Southern Ocean down at St Kilda pier during a winter storm – you’re reminded just how tiny you are, but there’s something magnificent about that realisation.