Photography as an addiction and its cycle of happiness

“Is creating content making you happy? What drives you to keep making content?”

In very few paragraphs I shall be able to tell you the benefits of taking your photography addiction in a positive manner and what a happiness cycle of photography really means. Its not a clear cut formula but a general assumption.

Many people love to cook, dance, exercise, meditate and paint. They say that these activities make them escape the reality and gives them pleasure. I have heard some people say that these are not only pleasant activities but also, more strongly, positive addictions. It may sound weird but my cousin sister watches chalk eating videos every single day, that gives her satisfaction just like other addictions would have. These positive addictions provide a sense of freedom, more confidence, more creativity and happiness.

Few criteria for a person to have a positive addiction to an activity:

1. It is something that you devote a lot of time to it. You don’t realize how time flies very quickly.

2. You see a lot of positive changes happening around you through this activity.

3. It comes very naturally to you and it doesn’t take a lot of mental effort to do it well.

4. You believe that it serves some important value to you.

5. You believe that if you persist at it you will improve and reach greater heights.

Doing photography and creating amazing visuals definitely gets our dopamine high. Dopamine is released when your brain is expecting a reward which is associated with pleasure and happiness. When we started doing photography, we made pictures that certainly made us happy, but we never thought about making money. Money is just the byproduct.

But why is making content and sharing on social media making us happy? Its pretty simple, we make content that we are really connected to. We make photographs that tell a story that is really close to our heart. When someone is looking at one of our photographs, they can see something exactly the way we saw it. Photography can be a very artistic, visual and creative way of conveying ideas. Sometimes we take hundreds of photographs, but there’s always that one picture which we think is absolutely amazing, keeps us going and inspires us to try it again and again.

Now you have made an amazing photograph and it makes you happy. Its time to share your masterpiece with the rest of the world. Social media like Instagram plays a very vital role that makes us produce quality content. We like to get likes, comments, shares that influences us to post. Positive feedback and honest audience appreciations boosts our confidence. The primary motivation for posting is to connect with others who really respect and appreciate your work. This makes the cycle complete. But its not always that we tend to get appreciated by others. People may not like your work or criticize it but we still keep making content because at the end its about making us happy. This is also the phase where we try out different things and constantly thrive on improving ourselves.

Hence the cycle would be as follows: