Vote Your Own Posts to Get Rich, or Vote Others’ Posts to Be Happy. Your Choice.

It’s no secret that you can hoard your Steem rewards if you want to. There are no limits to self-voting, so you can quite literally upvote yourself at 100% power ten times per day and collect rewards.

This is pretty selfish and lame in my opinion. Jerry Banfield points out a troubling fact in his recent post: https://steemit.com/hf20/@jerrybanfield/we-double-our-steem-power-upvoting-ourselves-every-181-days - we can double our steem power every 181 days just by self-voting.
_{Note: After writing the first draft of this post, I was warned that Mr. Banfield may make misleading claims some of the time - I haven't done enough research to know either way. Consider this info with caution.}

OK, right now you might be thinking “sounds great, I’m gonna start voting myself more!” Here’s something to consider:

The Science of Being Happy

Check this out: https://www.livescience.com/2376-key-happiness-give-money.html

This article talks about studies done to test how our spending habits make us feel. People were given money and told to spend it a certain way - either selfishly, or by giving gifts to others. Here’s what they learned:

"Regardless of how much income each person made," Dunn said, "those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not.”

Why do you earn money? Survival is the baseline. Beyond that, most people just want to be happy. They view money as something that can enable them to have more good feelings in their life.

The science is in: If you want to use money to feel good, give gifts to other people.

This has nothing to do with politics, taxes, welfare, or whatever. I’m saying that YOU should choose to give more of your money away. Whether that’s to charity, doing nice things for friends and family, or whatever else.

On Steem, it’s even easier. Just VOTE FOR OTHER PEOPLE! Don’t hoard your votes, it won’t help you feel good. Sure, I upvote my own posts 1-2x per day. However, the real joy comes from voting up my favorite posts that I see. Watching a post go up $1.00 in value when I vote it is just a great feeling.

And besides - what goes around, comes around. I didn’t start earning $30+ per post by upvoting myself, especially back when my votes were worth a mere $0.05. Nope, I think it was the opposite - by engaging with the community and trying to give back, it worked out that I was rewarded with way more value than I ever could have expected or asked for.

Do you have a story of a time you were generous with your money and felt great about it? Share ‘em in the comments, as always I’ll upvote my favorites.

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