Swarm Creativity Blog

In our quest for self-improvement—whether seeking better health, increased attractiveness, or greater wellbeing—we often reach for the quickest and easiest solutions. From miracle diets to surgical procedures, we tend to favor visible results and instant gratification. But what if the most effective approaches are the ones requiring the greatest effort—and the most self-awareness? That’s the idea behind the Social Compass app , a tool designed to help individuals navigate the deeper levels of transformation by identifying their personality traits, values, and behavioral tendencies. Using proven psychological assessments—like the Five-Factor Personality Inventory (FFI), the DOSPERT Risk-Taking Scale, and the Schwartz Values Survey—it maps out your unique profile, offering a personalized foundation for meaningful, lasting change. The Five Levels of Transformation Most self-improvement methods fall into a pyramid with five distinct levels. Each level offers a different approach to transfo...

It’s all about relationships: interacting with other people can be the biggest source of happiness, but it can also be the biggest source of misery! The quality of your relationships is determined by your emotions: When you manage your emotions during a disagreement with your best friend, it helps keep your friendship intact. However, if you lose control and get really angry, it can lead to losing your job or even causing harm in situations like road rage. Your relationships also determine the meaning in your life. If you have spent years searching for the meaning of life but nobody else cares about it, your hard work won't bring much satisfaction.You will only get meaning from what you do if you are surrounded by likeminded people. Even more, the people who make you happiest will also tell you WHAT makes you happiest! To measure and improve happiness, I thus came up with the “Emotions, Relationships, and Meaning” (ERM) Way to Happiness. We have previously used the PERMA model fro...

Happiness = Respect + Compassion = Kindness Respect and compassion are the two key properties of a benevolent society. To have happy citizens, it is essential to have both.  China is respectful but not compassionate, the US is compassionate but not respectful. And citizens of both countries are not particularly happy, at least compared to small Northern European countries like Denmark, Finland, Iceland, or Switzerland. Finland makes sure that workers in less qualified professions still get a decent wage sufficient to lead a dignified life. Switzerland is compassionate even with lobsters, it is the only country on the world with a law that forbids to boil them to death alive. Unfortunately, in this regard the two most powerful countries on Earth, both vying for global leadership, still have a long way to go. Americans are empathetic to their weak, but show no respect to their unqualified workers. Living in the US nearly half the time over the last twenty years, I observed that peopl...

Our team is currently working on measuring happiness using the body sensors of a smartwatch. In particular we have developed "happimeter" software to measure individual happiness, and show the influence of individuals on team happiness. Our premise is that measuring and giving feedback about happiness will increase individual and team happiness. When I describe our work to potential sponsors and other interested people, at some point in the discussion invariably the question comes up: WHY measuring happiness? When I then answer that our goal is to better understand what the determinants of happiness are to increase individual and team happiness, I get one of two reactions: Particularly in the US, most of the time, people will say "ah, I understand,  if you have happier people working with you, their productivity will go up, and the company will make more money." In other words, the capitalist's reaction is: "make people happier, so my company makes m...

Everybody is complaining about the ever-rising costs of health care. But could it be that this is actually a good thing, because it means we can afford to spend an ever-rising share of our dispensable income on our health? While there is undoubtedly some misuse of our healthcare dollars, and money is wasted on unnecessary beauty operations, or even worse, on lawyers filing malpractice suits, I think that the overall fraction of dispensable income a society can afford to spend on healthcare is a good benchmark for gross national happiness. There are many variables influencing happiness, such as income, being married, and age, but being in good health has been found to be one of the most reliable predictors of happiness, as has been shown by many researchers . Countries which are able to spend a large amount of their income on healthcare should therefore be happier. Does national happiness and healthcare spending indeed correlate? Because I could not find statistics, I did a quick calcu...

Waiting for my hair to be cut at the hairdresser today, I was reading an article in a German science magazine about happiness. The article was relying heavily on the world database of happiness , a research project at the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The researchers found that the Danes and Swiss are the happiest people, while people in Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Tanzania are the least happy. Out of 95 nations assessed, the US, one of the wealthiest countries, only ranks 17th by happiness. Why? While the per capita income in the US is even higher than that of Switzerland, the income is far less evenly distributed. With per capita income slightly below the US, Switzerland is still one of the wealthiest nations in per head income. The big difference to the US is that the income is more evenly distributed, and that Switzerland and Denmark take much better care of their underprivileged citizens. Switzerland even has some sort of negative income tax, where, if somebody has an inc...