Happiness-as-a-Service
HaaS (not the F1 team)
I got the spark for this post from a video on FIFA’s YouTube channel.
Neymar, widely considered one of the best players of our generation, was criticized and spat upon when he made it to the Brazilian National Team for this World Cup. The keyboard warriors who cursed manager Carlo Ancelotti for caving to media pressure missed a very obvious point: his value to the team isn’t too much about fitness and how lethal he is compared to his 2015 self. Although I’d argue he’s still one of the best big game players this sport has witnessed, his greatest asset is the innate sense of happiness and fun that he brings to the squad.
He hasn’t brought the World Cup home (yet!) but no one else has in this current generation. That also doesn’t mean he hasn’t led his teams to titles.
Along the same lines, I’m inspired by the Browser Company’s idea of optimizing for feelings: building products that invoke some sense of emotion, again something you cannot put a number to, only feel.
No matter how many goals Neymar has scored or how much revenue Arc has generated, they point us towards a larger question: how do you model happiness-as-a-service?
Happiness is often talked about as a metric in employee reviews and HR discussions, but here’s the fun thing: you cannot put a number to it.
Which is also why you cannot have an entirely autonomous AI system that improves people’s happiness. What cannot be quantified cannot be improved. You can only give people who spread happiness the benefit of such tools so that they can reach out to more people. That sense of real improvement only happens when you go out into the wild, talk to real users, see what’s wrong, and provide objective solutions to their very subjective problems. The machines take care of the heavy lifting.
Happiness and pleasure are two different things. Pleasure is a fleeting emotion, mostly sensory. You feel it and then you don’t. Happiness, on the other hand, is something that goes the distance. It’s a sense of security, well-being, cheerfulness, and a sense of purpose and meaning that may or may not come with comfort or efficiency, which is often conflated with happiness. For example, exercising regularly makes you uncomfortable and perhaps irritated in the short term, but over the course of days, weeks, months, and years, you feel better about yourself. On the flip side, shots upon shots of your favourite drink after a hectic Saturday night feels amazing in the moment. But if you’ve ever been hungover, you know what I’m talking about!
The tech of today excels at giving people bursts of pleasure: a means of escape, a way to feel better about their miserable selves by hacking neural pathways. Boredom is a solved problem. If you don’t believe me, notice how you open Instagram Reels (or a vape that charges through type-C cable) whenever you’re faced with an uncomfortable thought. And how then you watch the reel at 2x the speed because you don’t want you brain to even have the slimmest thread of thought that may pop up between the spaces of two spoken words.
But sometimes that’s exactly the opposite of what you need. Sometimes you need brutal honesty from someone you trust, a pep talk when you’re going at it and feeling low, or validation from an expert that keeps you going. None of that can be supplied by technology. We can only do what we know best: team up the perpetrators of happiness with the technology that helps them scale their impact in this world — reach out to more people, do better things and don’t burn themselves out in the process.
That’s the future we’re slowly building towards. We want people like financial advisors, fitness coaches, and career counsellors, who make a living by giving long-term happiness to people directly or indirectly, to reach out to as many people as they can, while making sure that their job of spreading happiness as a service earns them enough to not only survive, but thrive. That’s how the vision of a “delegation economy” becomes a reality.
We’re building something in this space. Wanna help build this? Shoot me a DM.
Neymar will always be one of the best!