Flow by Csikszentmihalyi
Ref: Csikszentmihalyi (2008). Flow. The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Collins.
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Summary
The main goal in life is the desire for growth, improvement, the actualization of potential.
Flow: The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
Flow is an optimal state of inner experience; one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy- or attention- is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives.
STUDIES ON FLOW have demonstrated repeatedly that more than anything else, quality of life depends on two factors: how we experience work, and our relations with other people.
It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is something that we make happen.
A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.
The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention.
Surrounded by an astounding panoply of recreational gadgets and leisure choices, most of us go on being bored and vaguely frustrated.
Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.
Leisure provides a relaxing respite from work, but it generally consists of passively absorbing information, without using any skills or exploring new opportunities for action. As a result, life passes in a sequence of boring and anxious experiences over which a person has little control.
The General Principle: Anything can be made enjoyable if we are willing to take control of it, and cultivate it in the direction of greater complexity.
The value of a school does not depend on its prestige, or its ability to train students to face up to the necessities of life, but rather on the degree of the enjoyment of lifelong learning it can transmit. A good factory is not necessarily the one that makes the most money, but the one that is most responsible for improving the quality of life for its workers and its customers. And the true function of politics is not to make people more affluent, safe, or powerful, but to let as many as possible enjoy an increasingly complex existence.
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Consciousness
Consciousness: Intentionally ordered information; the things we see, feel, think, desire- information that we can manipulate and use. Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.
The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body.
It seems we can manage at most 7 bits of information—such as sounds, visual stimuli, or recognizable nuances of emotion or thought—at any one time, and that the shortest time it takes to discriminate between one set of bits and another is about 1/18 of a second. By using these figures, one concludes that it is possible to process at most 126 bits of information per second, or 7,560 per minute, or almost half a million per hour. Over a lifetime of 70y, and counting 16h of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185B bits of information. It is out of this total that everything in our life must come—every thought, memory, feeling, or action.
The limitation of consciousness is demonstrated by the fact that to understand what another person is saying we must process 40 bits of information each second. If we assume the upper limit of our capacity to be 126 bits per second, it follows that to understand what three people are saying simultaneously is theoretically possible, but only by managing to keep out of consciousness every other thought or sensation. We couldn’t, for instance, be aware of the speakers’ expressions, nor could we wonder about why they are saying what they are saying, or notice what they are wearing.
Attention selects the relevant bits of information from the millions of bits available. Attention retrieves the appropriate references from memory, evaluates the event, and then chooses the right thing to do.
The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.
The basic pattern: some information that conflicts with an individual’s goals appears in consciousness. Depending on how central that goal is to the self and on how severe the threat to it is, some amount of attention will have to be mobilized to eliminate the danger, leaving less attention free to deal with other matters. Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals.
Adolescents who never learn to control their consciousness grow up to be adults without a “discipline.” They lack the complex skills that will help them survive in a competitive, information-intensive environment. And what is even more important, they never learn how to enjoy living. They do not acquire the habit of finding challenges that bring out hidden potentials for growth.
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Autotelic Personality
Autotelic (Greek): Auto- self, telos- goal; refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.
When an experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on its consequences.
As a way to grow while enjoying life, autotelic people take new challenges and stresses not as something to be repressed or avoided, but as an opportunity for learning and for improving skills.
Autotelic people make choices—ranging from lifelong commitments, such as getting married and settling on a vocation, to trivial decisions like what to do on the weekend or how to spend the time waiting in the dentist’s office—without much fuss and the minimum of panic.
A person with an autotelic self, upon entering the room, would shift his attention away from himself to the party—the “action system” he wishes to join. He would observe the guests, try to guess which of them might have matching interests and compatible temperament, and start talking to that person about topics he suspects will be mutually agreeable.
Non-Self-Conscious Individualism: People who do their best in all circumstances, yet they are not concerned primarily with advancing their own interests. Because they are intrinsically motivated in their actions, they are not easily disturbed by external threats. The KEY trait of an autotelic personality.
People who know how to transform stress into enjoyable challenge spend very little time thinking about themselves. They are not expending all their energy trying to satisfy what they believe to be their needs, or worrying about socially conditioned desires. Instead their attention is alert, constantly processing information from their surroundings. The focus is still set by the person’s goal, but it is open enough to notice and adapt to external events even if they are not directly relevant to what he wants to accomplish.
Early emotional security may well be one of the conditions that helps develop an autotelic personality in children. Without this, it is difficult to let go of the self-long enough to experience flow. Love without strings.
If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one’s shoulders. Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces.
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Flow
Flow: The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. Situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve goals. In flow, the duration of time is altered and concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience has ended.
The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives.
Flow occurs when:
We confront tasks we have a chance of completing.
We concentrate on what we are doing.
When all a person’s relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person’s attention is completely absorbed by the activity. There is no excess psychic energy left over to process any information but what the activity offers. All the attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli.
The concentration of the flow experience—together with clear goals and immediate feedback—provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic negentropy.
The task has clear goals and provides immediate feedback.
Clearly structured demands impose order, and exclude the interference of disorder in consciousness.
We act with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
We exercise a sense of control over our actions.
Flow’s essential steps:
(a) Set an overall goal, and as many subgoals as are realistically feasible.
(b) Closely monitor (and measure) progress in terms of the goals chosen and the feedback received.
(c) Keep concentrating on what you are doing, and keep making finer and finer distinctions in the challenges involved in the activity.
(d) Whenever you reach your goal, up the ante, setting increasingly complex challenges.
Set a goal, concentrate one’s psychic energy, pay attention to the feedback, and make certain that the challenge is appropriate to one’s skill. Sooner or later the interaction will begin to hum, and the flow experience follows.
When you are working at top performance the experience is so enthralling that it is almost painful to slow down.
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Obstacles to Flow
Self-conscious and self-centered individuals lack the attentional fluidity needed to relate to activities for their own sake; too much psychic energy is wrapped up in the self, and free attention is rigidly guided by its needs. Under these conditions it is difficult to become interested in intrinsic goals, to lose oneself in an activity that offers no rewards outside the interaction itself.
Self-Consciousness: The most common form of distraction; a person who is constantly worried about how others will perceive them, who is afraid of creating the wrong impression, or of doing something inappropriate, is condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment.
Self-Centeredness: A self-centered individual is usually not self-conscious, but instead evaluates every bit of information only in terms of how it relates to their desires. For such a person everything is valueless in itself. A self-centered self cannot become more complex, because all the psychic energy at its disposal is invested in fulfilling its current goals, instead of learning about new ones.
Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations. Entropy is the normal state of consciousness—a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.
Flow is not possible when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.
Inner Conflict: The result of competing claims on attention. Too many desires, too many incompatible goals struggle to marshal psychic energy toward their own ends.
The only way to reduce conflict is by sorting out the essential claims from those that are not, and by arbitrating priorities among those that remain.
When there are too many demands, options, challenges, we become anxious; when too few, we get bored.
The person who cannot resist food or alcohol, or whose mind is constantly focused on sex, is not free to direct his or her psychic energy.
A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. Instead of deciding how to act in terms of personal goals, he has to surrender to the things that his body has been programmed (or mis-programmed) to do. One must particularly achieve control over instinctual drives to achieve a healthy independence of society, for as long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.
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Business
The more a job inherently resembles a game—with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback—the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development.
When we feel that we are investing attention in a task against our will, it is as if our psychic energy is being wasted. Instead of helping us reach our own goals, it is called upon to make someone else’s come true. The time channeled into such a task is perceived as time subtracted from the total available for our life. Many people consider their jobs as something they have to do, a burden imposed from the outside, an effort that takes life away from the ledger of their existence. So even though the momentary on-the-job experience may be positive, they tend to discount it, because it does not contribute to their own long-range goals.
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Friends & Family
Friendship is not enjoyable unless we take up its expressive challenges. If a person surrounds himself with “friends” who simply reaffirm his public persona, who never question his dreams and desires, who never force him to try out new ways of being, he misses out on the opportunities friendship presents. A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. It is someone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails.
Later in life friendships rarely happen by chance: one must cultivate them as assiduously as one must cultivate a job or a family.
A person is part of a family or a friendship to the extent he invests psychic energy in goals shared with other people.
Autotelic Family Context: Family promoting optimal experiences have five characteristics that parallel the dimensions of the flow experience. Children who grow up in family situations that facilitate clarity of goals, feedback, feeling of control, concentration on the task at hand, intrinsic motivation, and challenge will generally have a better chance to order their lives so as to make flow possible.
Clarity: Children feel that they know what their parents expect from them—goals and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous.
Centering: The children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be getting into a good college or obtaining a well-paying job.
Choice: Children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules—as long as they are prepared to face the consequences.
Commitment: Trust allows children to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of their defenses, and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever they are interested in.
Challenge: Parents provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children.
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Sex
The pleasure of sexual intercourse is an equally practical method for the genes to program the body to reproduce and thereby to ensure the continuity of the genes. When a man is physically attracted to a woman, or vice versa, he usually imagines—assuming that he thinks about it at all—that this desire is an expression of his own individual interests, a result of his own intentions. In reality, more often than not his interest is simply being manipulated by the invisible genetic code, following its own plans. As long as the attraction is a reflex based on purely physical reactions, the person’s own conscious plans probably play only a minimal role. There is nothing wrong with following this genetic programming and relishing the resulting pleasures it provides, as long as we recognize them for what they are, and as long as we retain some control over them when it is necessary to pursue other goals, to which we might decide to assign priority.
How to keep love fresh? The answer is the same as it is for any other activity. To be enjoyable, a relationship must become more complex. To become more complex, the partners must discover new potentialities in themselves and in each other. To discover these, they must invest attention in each other—so that they can learn what thoughts and feelings, what dreams reside in their partner’s mind. This in itself is a never-ending process, a lifetime’s task. After one begins to really know another person, then many joint adventures become possible: traveling together, reading the same books, raising children, making and realizing plans all become more enjoyable and more meaningful.
The urge to have sex is so powerful that it can drain psychic energy away from other necessary goals. Like other pleasures, unless it is transformed into an enjoyable activity, sex easily becomes boring with time. It turns from a genuinely positive experience into either a meaningless ritual or an addictive dependence.
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Happiness
Pleasant activities that improve people’s mood for the entire day, the kind of events most often mentioned are “Being with happy people,” “Having people show interest in what I say,” “Being with friends,” and “Being noticed as sexually attractive.”
Enjoyment: Appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety; arises whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities.
Enjoyment derives not from the danger itself, but from the ability to minimize it. So rather than a pathological thrill that comes from courting disaster, the positive emotion they enjoy is the perfectly healthy feeling of being able to control potentially dangerous forces.
What people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations. It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and one is able to influence that outcome, can a person really know whether she is in control.
Strategies to improve the Quality of Life: 1) try making external conditions match your goals, and 2) Change how you experience external conditions to make them fit your goals better.
Each of us has a picture, however vague, of what we would like to accomplish before we die. How close we get to attaining this goal becomes the measure for the quality of our lives. If it remains beyond reach, we grow resentful or resigned; if it is at least in part achieved, we experience a sense of happiness and satisfaction.
Enjoyment depends on increasing complexity.
How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.
Learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people’s chances to enjoy theirs.
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Education
Many people give up on learning after they leave school because 13-20y of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories. Their attention has been manipulated long enough from the outside by textbooks and teachers, and they have counted graduation as the first day of freedom. Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically.
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Drugs
Any activity that transforms the way we perceive reality is enjoyable, a fact that accounts for the attraction of “consciousness-expanding” drugs of all sorts, from magic mushrooms to alcohol to the current Pandora’s box of hallucinogenic chemicals. But consciousness cannot be expanded; all we can do is shuffle its content, which gives us the impression of having broadened it somehow. The price of most artificially induced alterations, however, is that we lose control over that very consciousness we were supposed to expand.
A chemically altered consciousness may bring forth unusual images, thoughts, and feelings that later, when clarity returns, you can use. The danger is that in becoming dependent on chemicals for patterning the mind, you risk losing the ability to control it yourself.
While psychotropic drugs do provide a wider variety of mental experiences than one would not encounter under normal sensory conditions, they do so without adding to our ability to order them effectively.
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Culture
Culture: A defensive construction against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience.
Cultures differ from one another in terms of the degree of the “pursuit of happiness” they make possible.
Since every evaluation across cultures must necessarily involve at least one set of values foreign to one of the cultures being evaluated, the very possibility of comparison is ruled out. If we assume, however, that the desire to achieve optimal experience is the foremost goal of every human being, the difficulties of interpretation raised by cultural relativism become less severe. Each social system can then be evaluated in terms of how much psychic entropy it causes, measuring that disorder not with reference to the ideal order of one or another belief system, but with reference to the goals of the members of that society. A starting point would be to say that one society is “better” than another if a greater number of its people have access to experiences that are in line with their goals. A second essential criterion would specify that these experiences should lead to the growth of the self on an individual level, by allowing as many people as possible to develop increasingly complex skills.
A community should be judged as good not because it is technologically advanced, or because it is swimming in material riches; it is good if it offers people a chance to enjoy as many aspects of their lives as possible, while allowing them to develop their potential in the pursuit of ever greater challenges.
Early Christianity helped the masses free themselves from the power of the ossified imperial regime and from an ideology that could give meaning only to the lives of the rich and the powerful. The Reformation liberated great numbers of people from their political and ideological exploitation by the Roman Church. The philosophes and later the statesmen who drafted the American Constitution resisted the controls established by kings, popes, and aristocracy. When the inhuman conditions of factory labor became the most obvious obstacles to the workers’ freedom to order their own experience, as they were in 19c industrial Europe, Marx’s message turned out to be especially relevant. The much more subtle but equally coercive social controls of bourgeois Vienna made Freud’s road to liberation pertinent to those whose minds had been warped by such conditions. The insights of the Gospels, of Martin Luther, of the framers of the Constitution, of Marx and Freud—just to mention a very few of those attempts that have been made in the West to increase happiness by enhancing freedom—will always be valid and useful, even though some of them have been perverted in their application.
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Hatha Yoga
Yama: Requires that one achieve ‘restraint’ from acts and thoughts that might harm others- falsehood, theft, lust, and avarice.
Niyama: Involves ‘obedience,’ or the following of ordered routines in cleanliness, study, and obedience to god, all of which help to channel attention into predictable patterns, and hence, make attention easier to control.
Asana: Practice of ‘sitting’ or holding postures for long periods without succumbing to strain or fatigue.
Pranayama: Breath control, which aims to relax the body, and stabilizes the rhythm of breathing.
Pratyahara: The hinge between preparatory exercises and yoga proper; ‘withdrawal’, learning to withdraw attention from outward objects by directing the input of the senses- thus becoming able to see, hear, and feel only what one wishes to admit into awareness.
Dharana: ‘Holding On’; the ability to concentrate for long periods on a single stimulus, a mirror image of the earlier stage of pratyahara; first one learns to keep things out of the mind, then one learns to keep them in.
Dhyana: Intense meditation; one learns to forget the self in uninterrupted concentration that no longer needs the external stimuli of the preceding phase.
Samadhi: The last stage of ‘self-collectedness’; the mediator and the object of mediation become as one. Those who have achieved it describe samadhi as the most joyful experiences in their lives.
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Misc Quotes
“The ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks is the quality people most admire in others, and justly so; it is probably the most important trait not only for succeeding in life, but for enjoying it as well.”
“It makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account.”
“Cheerfulness, and often Confidence, that is, a mind devoid of fear, is the highest good.”-Democritus.
“The future will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.”-CK Brightbill.
“This paradox of rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task.”
“Without training in the discipline of skepticism and reciprocal criticism that underlies the scientific method, laypersons who venture into the fields of knowledge with prejudiced goals can become more ruthless, more egregiously unconcerned with truth, than even the most corrupt scholar.”
“Yu is the proper way to live—without concern for external rewards, spontaneously, with total commitment—in short, as a total autotelic experience.”-Chuang Tzu.
“It becomes all too easy to settle down within the narrow boundaries of the self, developed in adolescence. But if one gets to be too complacent, feeling that psychic energy invested in new directions is wasted unless there is a good chance of reaping extrinsic rewards for it, one may end up no longer enjoying life, and pleasure becomes the only source of positive experience.”
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”-Thomas Jefferson.
“It is not the hearing that improves life, it is the listening. We hear Muzak, but we rarely listen to it.”
“The brain surgeon operating in a shining hospital and the slave laborer who staggers under a heavy load as he wades through the mud are both working. But the surgeon has a chance to learn new things every day, and every day he learns that he is in control and that he can perform difficult tasks. The laborer is forced to repeat the same exhausting motions, and what he learns is mostly about his own helplessness.”
“It is in the improvident use of our leisure, I suspect, that the greatest wastes of American life occur.”-Sociologist Robert Park.
“Those who try to make life better for everyone without having learned to control their own lives first usually end up making things worse all around.”
“The laws that govern circumstances are abolished by new circumstances.”-Napoleon.
“The self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years.”
“Those who make the most of the potential for enjoyment inherent in music have strategies for turning the experience into flow. They begin by setting aside specific hours for listening. When the time comes, they deepen concentration by dousing the lights, by sitting in a favorite chair, or by following some other ritual that will focus attention. They plan carefully the selection to be played, and formulate specific goals for the session to come.”
“The worst moods are reported when one is alone and there is nothing that needs to be done.”
“Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.”-Bertrand Russel on Happiness.
“Without challenge, life has no meaning.”
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Terminology
Amateur (Latin- ‘Amare’): ‘To love’; originally referred to a person who loved what he was doing.
Autotelic (Greek): Auto- self, telos- goal; refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. When an experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on its consequences.
Compete (Latin- ‘Con Petire’): Originally meant ‘to seek together’.
Differentiated Family: Each person in a family is encouraged to develop his or her unique traits, maximize personal skills, and set individual goals.
Dilettante (Latin- ‘Delectare’): ‘To find delight in’; originally referred to someone who enjoyed a given activity.
Enjoyment: Appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety; arises whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities.
Idiot (Greek): Originally a ‘private person’- someone who is unable to learn from others.
Integrated Family: (In contrast to differentiation), what happens to one person will affect all others. If a child is proud of what she accomplished in school, the rest of the family will pay attention and will be proud of her, too. If the mother is tired and depressed, the family will try to help and cheer her up.
Narcissist: A person mainly concerned with protecting their self; attention is tuned inwards, not outwards.
Ontological Anxiety (Existential Dread): Fear of being; a feeling that there is no meaning to life and that existence is not worth going on with. Nothing makes sense.
Religion: The oldest and most ambitious attempt to create order in consciousness.
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