By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Goodreads | Amazon
How strongly I recommend reading it: 8/10
Flow aims to use the tools of psychology to attempt to solve one of philosophy’s first problems – how does one be happy? But rather than reading as a self-help book, “Flow” speaks in our all-so-common language of frameworks and principles.
Simply put, being in Flow is to be in control of the contents of your consciousness. There are certain conditions that encourage “Flow” and these are elaborated through examples of everyday pursuits. Hopefully, this post offers a decent gist for the uninitiated.
Notes are structured as a chapter-wise collection of prose (both verbatim or paraphrased) worth re-reading within the book. # denotes personal notes.
Reading time: ~15 mins
CHAPTER 1: HAPPINESS REVISITED
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.
Roots of discontent:
The universe was not designed for human comfort
The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they forget to derive pleasure from the present
Shields of culture : Religion, culture has shielded us against this chaos
Reclaiming experience :
Much of contemporary “realism” turns out to be just a variation on good old-fashioned fatalism : people feel relieved of responsibility by recourse to the concept of “nature”. By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we not try to learn?
There is no question that to survive, and especially to survive in a complex society, it is necessary to work for external goals and to postpone immediate gratifications. But a person does not have to be turned into a puppet jerked about by social controls. The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers.
Paths of liberation :
The knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes. The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, might have have been excellent in their own time – and might still be the best, if we lived in those times and in those cultures. They contain elements that are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and the seeker is back where he started.
CHAPTER 2: THE ANATOMY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness = intentionally ordered information
We may call intentions the force that keeps information in consciousness ordered.
Intentions shaped by biological needs or internalised social goals
Limits of consciousness
Upper limit of processing power = 126 bits
To converse = 40 bits needed
Attention as psychic energy
Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated.
The names we use to describe personality traits – such as extrovert, high achiever, or paranoid – refer to the specific patterns people have used to structure their attention.
Enter the self
Self = contents of consciousness = everything that’s passed through us
The patient reader who has followed the argument so far might detect at this point a faint trace of circularity. If attention, or psychic energy, is directed by the self, and if the self is the sum of the contents of consciousness and the structure of its goals, and if the contents of consciousness and the goals are the result of different ways of investing attention, then we have a system that is going round and round, with no clear causes or effects. In fact, consciousness is not a strictly linear system, but one in which circular causality obtains. Attention shapes the self and is in turn shaped by it.
#But which is shaped first the self or attention? Potentially, the self due to ‘natural’ biases (genetic programs), which are then moulded by nurture (social environment). Genetic programs direct attention as and when a newborn grasps the concept of attention. Once attention starts to get directed somewhere, the social environment takes over and attention is moulded by it.
Disorder in consciousness : Psychic entropy
Psychic disorder : Information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out.
A new piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness, by getting us all worked up to face the threat, or it will reinforce our goals, thereby freeing up psychic energy.
Order in consciousness : Flow
The battle is not against the self, but against the entropy that brings disorder to consciousness. It is really a battle for the self; it is a struggle for establishing control over attention.
Complexity and growth of the self
Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes : differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies.
#Seems to be a pretty loose definition of complexity
When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again.
#Only if there’s a positive feedback/you win
CHAPTER 3: ENJOYMENT AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE
Pleasure and enjoyment
Pleasure = Feeling of contentment when information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met. Sleep, rest, food, and sex provide restorative homeostasis experiences that return consciousness to order after the needs of the body intrude and cause psychic entropy to occur.
Enjoyment = Occurs when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before.
We can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention.
Elements of enjoyment
1. A challenging activity that requires skills
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.
#Sapiens : Happiness = Reality – Expectations
2. The merging of action and awareness
But in flow, there is no need to reflect because the action carries us forward as if by magic
#Reflection at the moment might not happen, but routine reflection even when engrossed in the activity is surely possible. The author clarifies this later.
#In the section on loss of self-consciousness, the author states that “in flow, there is no room for self-scrutiny. Because enjoyable activities have clear goals, stable rules, and challenges well matched to skills, there is little opportunity for the self to be threatened.” What he means by no need to reflect is probably self-threatening reflection.
3. Clear goals and feedback
4. Concentration on the task at hand
5. The paradox of control
What people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations
When a person becomes so dependent on the ability to control an enjoyable activity that he cannot pay attention to anything else, then he loses the ultimate control: the freedom to determine the content of consciousness. Thus enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative aspect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life.
6. The loss of self-consciousness
Preoccupation with self consumes psychic energy because in everyday life we often feel threatened. Hundreds of times every day we are reminded of the vulnerability of our self. And every time this happens psychic energy is lost trying to restore order to consciousness.
7. The transformation of time
#Very repetitive elements
The Autotelic experience
Auto = self, telos = goal
It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is not done with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.
Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. However once the interaction starts to provide feedback on the person’s skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding.
The flow experience, like everything else, is not “good” in an absolute sense. It is only good in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self.
Criminals often say things such as, “If you showed me something I can do that’s as much fun as breaking into a house at midnight and lifting the jewelry without waking anyone up, I would do it. Much of what we label juvenile delinquency – car theft, vandalism, rowdy behavior in general – is motivated by the same need to have flow experiences not available in ordinary life.”
#Interesting way to look at crime from the PoV of flow. There’s a definite link b/w unemployment and crime, but the author assumes employment solves for flow more than anything else and hence reduces crime. I’d say that employment solves for finances more than anything and hence reduces crime. Are ‘cultures of flow’ less crime-infested?
Jefferson’s uncomfortable dictum “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” applies outside the fields of politics as well; it means that we must constantly reevaluate what we do, lest habits and past wisdom blind us to new possibilities.
CHAPTER 4: THE CONDITIONS OF FLOW
Flow activities
Games, art, etc. are activities designed to create flow
How religious experiences were also created to encourage flow:
Not only art, drama, music, and dance had their origins in what we would now call “religious” settings; that is, activities aimed at connecting people with supernatural powers and entities. That same is true of games.
In modern times art, play, and life in general have lost their supernatural moorings. The cosmic order that in the past helped interpret and give meaning to human history has broken down into disconnected fragments. Many ideologies are now competing to provide the best explanation for the way we behave: the law of supply and demand and the “invisible hand” regulating the free market seek to account for our rational economic choices; The law of class conflict that underlies historical materialism tries to explain our irrational political actions; The genetic competition on which sociobiology is based would explain why we help some people and exterminate others; Behaviourism’s law of effect offers to explain how we repeat pleasurable acts, even when we are not aware of them. These are some of the modern “religions” rooted in the social sciences. None of them – with the partial exception of historical materialism, itself a dwindling creed – commands great popular support, and none has inspired the aesthetic visions or enjoyable rituals that previous models of cosmic order had spawned.
#It’s also because these “religions” did not have their primary objective of creating enjoyable rituals. Their focus was more on understanding and iterating on the current system.
Flow and culture
#For passage below. Similar to ‘Culturalism’ from Sapiens. However, he doesn’t give any reasons except ‘bad form’ for why we shouldn’t make judgments about cultures.
Over the past few generations, social scientists have grown extremely unwilling to make value judgments about cultures. Any comparison that is not strictly factual runs the risk of being interpreted as insidious. It is bad form to say that one culture’s practice, belief, or institution is in any sense better than another’s. This is “cultural relativism”, a stance anthropologists adopted in the early part of this century as a reaction against the overly smug and ethnocentric assumptions of the colonial Victorian era, when the Western industrial nations considered themselves to be the pinnacle of evolution, better in every respect than technologically less developed cultures. This naive confidence of our supremacy is long past. We might still object if a young Arab drives a truck of explosives into an embassy, blowing himself up in the process; but we can no longer feel morally superior in condemning his belief that Paradise has special sections reserved for self-immolating warriors. We have come to accept that our morality simply no longer has currency outside our own culture.
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.
One of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is this great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment.
The Autotelic personality
Some people are constitutionally incapable of experiencing flow: schizophrenics, ADHD
Biggest obstacles to flow:
Individual level = Excessive self-centeredness (always thinking about how does it affects me) or self-consciousness (afraid of creating a wrong impression) – too much psychic energy is wrapped up in the self
Societal level = anomie (lack of rules) and alienation (when people are constrained by society to act in ways that go against their goals)
It is interesting to note that these two societal obstacles to flow, anomie and alienation, are functionally equivalent to the two personal pathologies, attention disorders and self-centeredness. At both levels, the individual, and the collective, what prevents flow from occurring is either the fragmentation of attentional processes (as in anomie and attentional disorders), or their excessive rigidity ( as in alienation and self-centeredness). At the individual level, anomie corresponds to anxiety while alienation corresponds to boredom.
The effects of family on the autotelic personality
Characteristics of families promoting flow:
Clarity : Kids know what parents expect
Centering : Kids feel that parents are interested in what kids are doing
Choice : Kids feel that they have a variety of possibilities to choose from
Commitment : Trust that allows kids to set aside their shield of defenses
Challenge : Parents’ dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for kids
The People of flow
When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces. When every aspiration is frustrated, a person still must seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self. Then, even though that person is objectively a slave, subjectively he is free. Solzhenitsyn describes very well how even the most degrading situation can be transformed into a flow experience: “Sometimes when standing in a column of dejected prisoners, amidst the shouts of guards with machine guns, I felt such a rush of rhymes and images that I seemed to be wafted overhead…”
A single most important trait of autotelic personalities: Frankl
The most important trait of survivors is a “non-self conscious individualism” = a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking. People who have that quality are bent on doing their best in all circumstances, yet they are not concerned primarily with advancing their own interests.
CHAPTER 5: THE BODY IN FLOW
The Ultimate control: Yoga and martial arts
The similarities between Yoga and flow are extremely strong; in fact it makes sense to think of yoga as a very thoroughly planned flow activity. Both try to achieve a joyous, self-forgetful involvement through concentration, which in turn. The main divergence is that, whereas flow attempts to fortify the self, the goal of Yoga and many other Eastern techniques is to abolish it. Samadhi, the last stage of yoga, is only the threshold for entering Nirvana, where the individual self merges with the universal force like a river blending into the ocean. Therefore, it can be argued that Yoga and flow tend towards diametrically opposite outcomes.
But this opposition may be more superficial than real. After all, seven of the eighth stages of Yoga involve building up increasingly higher levels of skill in controlling consciousness. Samadhi and the liberation that is supposed to follow it may not, in the end, be that significant – they may in one sense be regarded as the justification of the activity that takes place in the previous seven stages, just as the peak of the mountain is only important because it justifies climbing, which is the real goal of the enterprise. Another argument favoring the similarity of the two processes is that, even till the final stage of liberation, the yogin must maintain control over consciousness. He could not surrender himself unless, even at the very moment of surrender, in complete control of it. Giving up the self with its instincts, habits, and desires is so unnatural an act that only someone supremely in control can accomplish it. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to regard Yoga as one of the oldest and most systematic methods of producing the flow experience.
Sex as flow
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.
Body as flow, flow of music, flow through senses : the joys of seeing, the joys of tasting
No notes
Only through “freely chosen discipline” can life be enjoyed, and still kept within the bounds of reason.
CHAPTER 6: THE FLOW OF THOUGHT
Unless a person knows how to give order to his 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
The mother of science
#Interesting take on creativity and rote learning. Basically how creativity is associative
But for a person who has nothing to remember, life can become severely impoverished. This possibility was completely overlooked by educational reformers early in the century, who, armed with research results, proved that “rote learning” was not an efficient way to store and acquire information. As a result of their efforts, rote learning was phased out of the schools. If control of consciousness is judged to be at least as important as the ability to get things done, then learning complex patterns of information by heart is by no means a waste of effort. A mind with some stable content to it is much richer than one without. It is a mistake to assume that creativity and rote learning are incompatible.
The rules of the games of the mind
It is important to stress here a fact that is all too often lost sight of: philosophy and science were invented and flourished because thinking is pleasurable.
This claim, however, flies in the face of most current theories of cultural development. Historians imbued with variants of the precepts of materials determinism hold that thought is shaped by what people must do to make a living. For these historians, every creative step is interpreted as the product of extrinsic forces, whether they be wars, demographic pressures, territorial ambitions, market conditions, technological necessity, or the struggle for class supremacy. External forces are very important in determining which new ideas will be selected from among the many available; but they cannot explain their production.
#It might’ve flourished because it’s pleasurable, but a lot of invention is born out of necessity.
The play of words
A more substantive potential use of words to enhance our lives is the lost art of conversation. Utilitarian ideologies in the past two centuries have convinced us that the main purpose of talking is to convey useful information. Thus we now value terse communication that conveys practical knowledge, and consider anything else a frivolous waste of time. As a result, people have become almost unable to talk to each other outside of narrow topics of immediate interest and specialisation.
Befriending Clio
Clio = Daughter of ‘culture’, responsible for keeping orderly accounts of past events.
Democritus – “a mind devoid of fear, the highest good”
On amateur philosophy : Specialisation is for the sake of thinking better, not an end in itself.
Loving Wisdom – on how philosophy = love of wisdom
It is a common fate of many human institutions to begin as a response to some universal problem until, after many generations, the problems peculiar to that institutions themselves will take precedence over the original goal.
Amateur and professionals
Amateur and dilettante:
Amateur came from latin ‘amare’ – to love
Dilettante came from latin ‘delectare’ – to find delight in
The earliest meaning of these words therefore drew attention to experiences rather than accomplishments; they described the subjective rewards individuals gained from doing things, instead of focusing on how well they were achieving. Nothing illustrates as clearly our changing attitudes toward the value of experience as the fate of these two words.
The point of becoming an amateur scientist is not to compete with professionals on their own turf, but to use a symbolic discipline to extend mental skills, and to create order in consciousness. On that level, amateur scholarship can hold its own, and can be even more effective that its professional counterpart. But the moment amateurs lose sight of this goal, and use knowledge mainly to bolster their egos or to achieve a material advantage, then they become caricatures of the scholar. 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 the truth, than even the most corrupt scholar.
CHAPTER 7: WORK AS FLOW
Old italian saying : ‘Work gives man nobility, and turns him into an animal’
Because work is so universal, yet so varied, it makes a tremendous difference to one’s overall contentment whether what one does for a living is enjoyable or not.
Autotelic workers
Most striking feature of such places (where cultures evolve to make everyday chores as close to flow as possible) is that those who live there can seldom distinguish work from free time.
Joe (a factory worked in automobile) has never been a workaholic, completely dependent on the challenges of the factory to feel good about himself.
#Chapter gives examples of 3 workers who imbibe flow into their jobs. Most striking feature about them is as above. Along with an autotelic personality. But autotelic personality also implies a certain indifference towards end outcomes and thinking that the journey is the reward.
Autotelic jobs
Even the most favourable external conditions do not guarantee that a person will be in flow. Because optimal experience depends on a subjective evaluation of what the possibilities for action are, and of one’s own capacities, it happens quite often that an individual will be discontented even with a potentially great job.
To improve quality of life through work, two complementary strategies are necessary:
1. Jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible to flow activities – hunting, weaving, surgery etc.
2. People need to develop autotelic personalities – by being trained to recognise opportunities for action, hone their skills, set reachable goals.
Neither one of these strategies is likely to make work much more enjoyable by itself; in combination, they should contribute enormously to optimal experience.
#Point 2 in the above takes away the factor of being motivated by material or societal rewards to improve quality of life through work. Autotelic personalities are required. You need to make peace with the fact that non-self conscious individualism is the way to go in jobs as well. So extrinsic motivation will not work, it has to be intrinsic. Sounds about right.
The Paradox of Work
In our studies we have often encountered a strange inner conflict in the way people relate to the way they make their living. On the one hand, our subjects usually report that they have had some of their most positive experiences while on the job. From this response it would follow that they would wish to be working, that their motivation on the job would be high. Instead, even when they feel good, people generally say that they would prefer not to be working, that their motivation on the job is low. The converse is also true : when supposedly enjoying their hard-earned leisure, people report surprisingly low moods; yet they keep on wishing for more leisure.
Results of a study conducted by the author:
Thrice as many flow moments in work than leisure. That is because work is more organised and its difficult to actively create flow conditions in leisure
Managerial roles > blue collar workers for flow. But blue collar workers > managerial during leisure
However, most people have a stronger propensity to be somewhere else during work than leisure. That’s because how we perceive jobs.
Top 3 reasons why jobs were shitty:
Lack of variety and challenge – perceive opportunities better
Conflict with colleagues and managers – Potentially set the challenge of reaching one’s goals while helping the boss and colleagues reach theirs.
Too much pressure – change perception of stress, better handling
CHAPTER 8: ENJOYING SOLITUDE AND OTHER PEOPLE
Flow and the family
The notion of family life typically implies constraints, responsibilities that interfere with one’s goals and freedom of action. While this is true, especially when the marriage is one of convenience, what we tend to forget is that these rules and obligations are no different, in principle, than those rules that constrain behaviour in a game. Like all rules, they exclude a wide range of possibilities so that we might concentrate fully on a selected set of options.
CHAPTER 9 : CHEATING CHAOS
None
CHAPTER 10: THE MAKING OF MEANING
What meaning means
Each culture has a way of ascribing meaning
Anna Haredt concluded that meaning must transcend mortality. Or else it won’t be as effective. (If you’re anyway gonna die, what’s the use)
Pitrim Sorokin and the categorisation of culture – sensate (sensory maximisation), ideational (some idea or thought to chase), idealistic (mix of two)
Few things are sadder than the person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. “He who desires but acts not,” wrote Blake with this accustomed vigor, “breeds pestilence”
Cultivating purpose
Happiness is when there is perfect congruence between your thoughts and actions
4 steps of developing a concept who one is and what they want to achieve in life –
Each man or woman starts with the need to preserve the self, to keep the body and its basic goals from disintegrating. At this point the meaning of life is simple; it is tantamount to survival, comfort and pleasure.
When the safety of the physical self is no longer in doubt, the person may expand the horizon of his or her meaning system to embrace the values of a community – the family, the neighborhood. Etc. This leads to greater complexity of the self, even though it usually implies conformity to conventional norms and standards.
The next step is reflective individualism. The person again turns inward, finding new grounds for authority and value within the self. At this point the main goal in life becomes the desire for growth, improvement, the actualisation of potential.
The fourth step, which builds on all the previous ones, is a final turning away from the self, back toward an integration with other people and with universal values.
Forging resolve
Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal
The wealth of options we face today has extended personal freedom to an extent that would have been inconceivable even a hundred years. But the inevitable consequence of equally attractive choices is uncertainty of purpose; uncertainty, in turn, saps resolution, and lack of resolve ends up devaluing choice.
Self-knowledge – an ancient remedy so old that its value is easily forgotten – is the process through which one may organise conflicting options, “Know thyself” was carved over the entrance to the Delphic oracle, and ever since untold pious epigrams have extolled its virtue.
It is relatively easy to bring order to the mind for short stretches of time; any realistic goal can accomplish this. A good game, an emergency at work, a happy interlude at home will focus attention and produce the harmonious experience of flow. But it is much more difficult to extend this state of being through the entirety of life. For this it is necessary to invest energy in goals that are so persuasive that they justify effort even when our resources are exhausted and when fate is merciless in refusing us a chance at having a comfortable life.
Recovering life
Animals’ skills are always matched to concrete demands because their minds, such as they are, only contain information about what is actually present in the environment in relation to their bodily states, as determined by instinct. So a hungry lion only perceives what will help it to find a gazelle, while a sated lion concentrates fully on the warmth of the sun. Its mind does not weigh possibilities unavailable at the moment; it neithers imagines pleasant alternatives nor is it disturbed by fears of failure.
The inner harmony of technologically less advanced people is the positive side of their limited choices and of their stable repository of skills, just as the confusion in our soul is the necessary consequence of unlimited opportunities and constant perfectibility. Goethe represented this dilemma in the bargain Doctor Faustus, the archetype of modern man, made with Mephistopheles: the good doctor gained knowledge and power, but at the price of introducing disharmony in his soul.
The unification of meaning in life themes
Instead of accepting the unity of purpose provided by genetic instructions or by the rules of society, the challenge for us is to create harmony based on reason and choice. Philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau – Ponty have recognised this task of modern man by calling it the project, which is their term for the goal-directed actions that provide shape and meaning to an individual’s life.
Discovered life themes are fragile for a different reason: because they are products of a personal struggle to define the purpose of life, they have less social legitimacy; because they are often novel and idiosyncratic, they may be regarded by others as crazy or destructive. Some of the most powerful life themes are based on ancient human goals, but freshly discovered and freely chosen by the individual.
#After a story about E where he decided to become a lawyer after some childhood injustice – So the next question is, what kinds of explanations for one’s suffering lead to negentropic life themes? To find purpose in suffering one must interpret it as a possible challenge. Finally, a complex, negentropic life theme if rarely formulated as the response to just a personal problem. Instead, the challenge becomes generalised to other people, or to mankind as a whole.
There is much knowledge – or well-ordered information – accumulated in culture, ready for this use. Great music, architecture, art, poetry, drama, dance, philosophy
So to extract meaning from a system of beliefs a person must first compare the information contained in it with his or her concrete experience, retain what makes sense, and then reject the rest.
#fall prey to confirmation bias (had written in the book)