Steve Jobs who passed away two days ago at the age of 56 was perhaps the greatest creative personality the world will ever know. He was a visionary CEO who thought like an artist. He forever changed the world we live in. There have of course been others before him: Freud, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Henry Ford come to mind foremost, but the knowledge or products they have given us have at best been ambiguously beneficial to mankind. Jobs managed to give us unambiguous happiness. We never knew that we wanted the products he conceived but once he gave them to us they not only became indispensable to our lives, but they made us happy.

This may be the single most important contribution Jobs has made to mankind. Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Jesuit philosopher once wrote that “all happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.”

As neuroscience has recently confirmed, we love our iPhones, literally.

Steve Jobs will be remembered for many reasons, most of which begin with a lowercase “i,” but he will forever be loved for giving us happiness.

Apple Store, Columbus Avenue, New York City, October 7, 2011. Photo: Klaus Ottmann

Apple Store, Regent Street, London, October 9, 2011. Photo: Klaus Ottmann