The Coin-Tray Audit

The protocol is intentionally small enough to run at home: record every discretionary purchase below €2 for seven days, assign it one job—comfort, convenience, connection, curiosity, or delight—and hide the ledger until the following week. Photographing the item is optional; photographing a bank statement is very much not required.

On day fourteen, mark each entry used, remembered, replaced, or forgotten and add one plain sentence explaining the choice. The hypothesis is that repeatable benefits will be remembered more reliably than momentary ones, but the protocol treats disagreement as data rather than an arithmetic emergency.

A useful result would be a personal pattern, not a universal commandment about coffee or biscuits. Report counts and the categories you chose, keep amounts separate from identity, and rerun the audit in another month before promoting one week of pocket archaeology into a life philosophy.

Cheap is a number; remembered can become evidence.