Flow

April 2019

Title:	Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Author(s):	Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Book Link:	Amazon

Flow: the state of being completely immersed in an activity for its own sake.

I wrote about why this idea is sometimes whack.

Highlights

Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person.
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.
The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind.
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.
Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we invest this energy.
Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience.
One of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is this great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment.
However, enjoyment, as we have seen, does not depend on what you do, but rather on how you do it.
Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet or essayist. Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully little) out of writing, it’s considered to be a waste of time. It is taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it.
Again, the importance of personally taking control of the direction of learning from the very first steps cannot be stressed enough. If a person feels coerced to read a certain book, to follow a given course because that is supposed to be the way to do it, learning will go against the grain. But if the decision is to take that same route because of an inner feeling of rightness, the learning will be relatively effortless and enjoyable.
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.
When a young man asked Carlyle how he should go about reforming the world, Carlyle answered, “Reform yourself. That way there will be one less rascal in the world.” The advice is still valid.
Subjective experience is not just one of the dimensions of life, it is life itself.
Why are some people weakened by stress, while others gain strength from it? Basically the answer is simple: those who know how to transform a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled will be able to enjoy themselves, and emerge stronger from the ordeal.
This attitude occurs when a person no longer sees himself in opposition to the environment, as an individual who insists that his goals, his intentions take precedence over everything else. Instead, he feels a part of whatever goes on around him, and tries to do his best within the system in which he must operate. Paradoxically, this sense of humility—the recognition that one’s goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity, and that to succeed one may have to play by a different set of rules from what one would prefer—is a hallmark of strong people.
It is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into the fabric of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. But it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning.
Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it.