I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what numbers mean to us. Not in a mathematical sense, but in that psychological way where certain figures become cultural markers. You know, like how $1 million used to be the definition of wealth, or how $100,000 was once the salary that meant you’d “made it.”

That second one particularly interests me because I’ve been watching it lose its lustre in real-time. Someone online recently pointed out that the median full-time salary in Australia is now sitting just over $104,500. Let that sink in for a moment. The median – meaning half of all full-time workers earn more than this. A hundred grand isn’t aspirational anymore; it’s literally average.

There’s a statistic doing the rounds that’s been gnawing at me for days now: nearly half of all full-time workers in Australia earn over $100,000 a year. When I first read that, my initial reaction was disbelief. Then I remembered what my salary was a decade ago, what it is now, and how much less I seem to have in my pocket at the end of each month despite earning considerably more on paper.