Why Helping the Community Brings Me Joy

More than the joy of winning first place, the happiness of having to help someone lasts so much longer. Happiness is an emotion of one feeling joy at doing something they love, enjoy, or simply just helping someone and feeling proud, that moment is happiness.

The difference between short term and long term is that short term happiness is temporary, while long term happiness lasts for a long time. For example, short term happiness relates to money because money makes people selfish and greedy for more since this modern world is all about money. When you have money you are happy, but when you use it all your happiness is gone before you even notice, like the speed of light.

For long term happiness, an example would be eating healthy because it contributes to your health and you would be healthier, happier, and live longer. Therefore, your happiness contributes to the community's happiness because when you’re happy, your neighbors are happy and the people around you are happy. A community that helps people, the environment, and family and friends contribute to a person’s happiness.

Helping others is a given because not only are you doing it for your own happiness but you're also making someone else's day by helping them and adding a little happiness to their life and yours. Not every day can you help someone and even if you can, not all of it is safety-related. It’s easy to ignore people who need help but by doing that you’re also ignoring yourself and your happiness. According to the article Doing Good Does You Good, it talks about helping others and yourself, it mentions, “While many of us feel too stressed and busy to worry about helping others, or say we’ll focus on doing good deeds when we have more ‘spare time’, evidence shows that helping others is actually beneficial for your own mental health and wellbeing.' I believe that happiness from helping others is like having a scar in a good way because you’ll remember it more as memories of how it happened or what happened.

When I was in school and some of my friends needed help with homework and asked me to help them and when I did, I remember it as a happy occasion because out of everyone that they could’ve chosen, they decided to ask me instead. Why does happiness come from helping people? It’s because when you help someone, it can help improve your emotional wellbeing, maintain good health and reduce stress which adds more meaning to your life. “The healthier you are, the more likely you are to be happy. The obvious moral is that you'll be happier if you eat right, exercise, get preventive care, and reduce your stress level.” (Joan 8) By helping others in the long run, it helps people connect and build a happier community.

In this modern world, we have seen on the news and social media about how people are loitering on the streets and in the water, which makes the environment we live in polluted and not clean. Yet, without knowing how an unclean atmosphere and environment can cause us to behave or feel, we don’t realize the dangers and outcomes it has on us. Or how bad the negative effects, affect our mental and physical health which causes people to feel anxious, helpless, and overwhelmed. By cleaning the house it’s been proven that it can help reduce stress, improve happiness, and even improve your eating and exercise habits, and it makes the house clean. I didn’t know that cleaning the house can affect one’s mood and improve your wellbeing. Why is cleaning related to happiness? Why is having a clean environment have anything to do with happiness?

We all have cleaned a house and had house chores before, even as an adult we’re constantly cleaning or being told to clean in order to keep the dust and dirt away. By doing that, we’re keeping our community clean and healthy which allows us to enjoy life to the fullest. There were times when the house was super dirty but I felt too lazy to clean it and would skip it or tell myself I’ll do it tomorrow, but in the end, I never did it which resulted in my mom always being mad. Once I cleaned, the environment in the house got happier.

According to the article ‘The Jakarta Post,’ it shows that “72 percent reported they sleep better in a clean house, 80 percent feel more relaxed and 60 percent feel less stress. Biometric analysis further discovered that the happiness of survey participants drastically increased upon entering a cleanroom.” which can boost productivity.

Nowadays I see people litter every chance they get. I see trash everywhere on the street. If we can just start to change society to becoming cleaner and help the environment. We could have a better and clean community, which is a start to a happier society because everyone will have a much better day filled with happiness than feeling stressed and sick all the time.