Happy Sparks – The Story behind the Idea

Social media has made the world a smaller, it has connected people and so much more. But inadvertently I believe it became one of our generations’ biggest paradoxes. We have all these connections and friends we have made and yet somehow we still feel like outsiders looking through filters into other people’s distant lives. There is a lot of content on social media that is made for ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ but not necessarily created with the intention to nurture and build meaningful relationships. This is the content that sadly is in short supply.

In ‘The Definitive Guide to Hacking Happiness’ Emma Seppala, Ph.D states that “anxiety and depression are on the rise,” citing that, “one study shows that anti-depressant use has risen over 400 percent in recent years. One in 10 Americans currently uses a psychotropic medication for anxiety, depression, or similar conditions. A recent study found that this rise in anxiety and depression is occurring in teenagers as well.”

Coincidentally, North America has 11 percent of the world’s social media users, second to East Asia with 37 percent according to Global Digital Statistics of 2014. The research conducted by Cornell University and the U 37niversity of California on 689,000 Facebook users through a process called ‘emotional contagion’, showed that when “‘positive emotional content’ from friends was reduced, users would post more negative content themselves, essentially becoming unhappier. It was, according to the researchers “the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks” – showing a correlation of how content on social networks can affect the level of happiness. Scary.

I looked around and saw there were no social platforms for people to create and share happy content. Most social networks are flooded with feeds and notifications. The positive content just get lost in it all which, from research can make a network have a ‘negativity atmosphere’. We wanted to create a place easy for users to find happy content.

Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. Being happy is about feeling good. Meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way and this lead me on a journey of asking friends what they would do if they had a chance to make someone happy using audio, photo, note or a drawing - “what would you create?” I got a lot creative ideas as to what they would create and for whom and this was the motivation behind this app, a platform to create meaningful content for people they care about – 36 days before the ‘initial’ deadline of the Happiness Challenge! Over past few weeks it has become our endeavor to make the world a happier place.

On a personal note, during the development of HappySparks, there were countless times of stress and depression as building a social network while studying and working was not an easy task but my family and loved ones kept me positive with messages and deeds. In retrospect, these were the very first “HappySparks” I received.

Note: For further reading on the idea behind HappySparks please refer to "HappySparks – The Full Story Behind The Idea" attached as a PDF document in the submission