Why a pay rise stops feeling like one

It took about eight weeks for your last raise to become invisible. That is not ingratitude. It is how reference points work, and you can use it.

Think back to your last pay rise. For a few weeks, checking your account felt different. Then it stopped. The new number became the number, and the old number became something that happened to a previous person.

We do not experience income as a level. We experience it as a change from a reference point, and the reference point moves. Once the higher salary becomes what you expect, it produces no feeling at all. Only a further change would.

This sounds bleak and is actually useful.

If a raise gives you eight weeks of feeling and then nothing, then the money is better spent on things that do not become reference points. Experiences fade in a different way from possessions: you stop noticing the car in your driveway within a month, but a trip you took ten years ago still produces something when you think about it. Spending on other people works similarly; it does not reset.

The other move is to keep the reference point still. If you can hold your lifestyle at the old level for a while after a rise, the gap between what you earn and what you expect to spend is where the freedom lives. It is a strange trick, feeling richer by refusing to update, but it works.

Most financial advice is about the number. Very little of it is about what the number does inside your head, which is where the whole thing is decided.