Tech at the Service of Global Happiness

While we, Wehappers Program founders, were reflecting on ways to get beyond our respective involvement with tech startups and more specifically on how Technology could help make the world better… we came across an article from Packy McCormick’s blog “Not Boring”: The Happiness Hypothesis ^[1] This article served as a catalyst for all our thoughts and inspired our new purpose and mission. Thank you Packy for helping us see our clear path forward.

The Happiness Hypothesis

In his blog Packy explores the concept of happiness and its potential enhancement through technology.

Sometimes seen as futile, inequality factor or threat, we believe that technology can act as a catalyst for increasing happiness potential due to its ability to address scarcity, reduce mortality, and provide opportunities for increased well-being.

Technological advancements have the capacity to improve lives by offering convenience, efficiency, and access to resources that contribute to happiness. Innovations in healthcare, education, communication, and even potential future technologies like AI and biotech are means to improve the overall quality of life.

Likewise we believe that the purpose of technology should be to increase the potential for human happiness.

And that’s where we want to go with the Wehappers Program.

To get there, we need to consider the various factors that contributed to this pursuit and to be able to measure the impact of technology on happiness. Packy proposes a mathematical interpretation to quantify its effects on happiness:

Basically this measures the Positive impact (>0) an action has on the level of happiness (Δh) of people (p).

That’s what the Wehappers Program is all about.

‍ Packy takes an example evaluating the Happiness Potential Score of using a tech tool such as a CRM at a world scale. (Δh) vary from -1 to 1.
Such a tool is helping a very small portion of the population (3%) and only in their business tasks hence a probably low (Δh) of 0.01.

The table above shows the impact of such a tool on the Global Happiness level.

Through this example, we can clearly imagine the potential power of actions that would have a stronger positive impact on a much larger number of people.
This is what guides us in our choice of Initiatives and how we evaluate their impact.

That can be measured, can be changed.

While there are various attempts to measure happiness using metrics like GDP, life expectancy, social support, and freedom, we recognize the challenges in accurately quantifying and understanding the true essence of happiness.

Humans have found a consensus embodied in the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.^[2] The Wehappers Program follows these guidelines

We see technology as a means capable of not only solving problems but also enhancing human experiences, facilitating connections, and offering solutions that contribute to individual and societal happiness. There is a huge disparity among individuals.

13% of the world’s adult population (the lucky few) own 86% of the global wealth, while 87% (the unprivileged majority) share the remaining 14%. ^[3]

‍From the challenge of raising happiness to the challenge of sharing wealth.

With the Wehappers program we want to give the happy-few, good reasons to share:

• We reimagine solidarity by making it desirable, fun, cooperative and productive.
• We focus on those who have the keys: time and money.
• We address those who want an economic model shift, those driven by the search for positive impact, those ready to become a better version of themselves.
• We think tech can help in connecting people to people, in giving easy access to a complex machine, in building a community, in shortening time and space, in offering a common language for the upcoming generations.
• We see tech as a tool, and like all tools, its use depends on who uses it and how.

Thus Wehappers develop a non-profit cooperative approach, guided by the conviction that happiness is an available, inexhaustible and still largely under-exploited resource.

See how Wehappers Program drives the Happiness Revolution.

References