People generally seem to believe that happiness is pleasure. However, this belief is not true. Personal consumption does not typically result in happiness — it results in short-term pleasures. Once the pleasures have faded, one must consume again thus repeating a dependent cycle that ultimately is dissatisfying. Relatively speaking, few of us study what science says about happiness resorting to malpractices and bad ideas instead. Here a number of happiness tips based in neuroscience research from the neuroscientist Moran Cerf in a presentation he gave.
Here are the top five, he starts talking about them around the 14:30 mark.
- Sleep
- Healthy social interaction
- Spirituality
- Volunteering
- Exercise
Sleep is by far the most important contributor to happiness.
So what does happiness have to do with content creation and publishing? Well, many organizations would not create a blog post or social media share about happiness. Their view might be that they can only share content about their work.
This is categorical thinking which limits our ideas about what we kind of content we can publish. There is no reason why we can’t share content that might increase the happiness of our customers or prospective customers. It doesn’t make human sense to only care about people who pay us money in exchange for our services and products. We could have a much broader and more inclusive perspective, one that is caring and generous without arbitrary restrictions.
Why don’t we care about customers as human beings first? It seems as though doing so would be a more effective way of relating.